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Month: November 2009

Is Blair back in the frame again for the EU job?

Is Blair back in the frame again for the EU job?

Should you be getting your money on Tony With decision time getting very close in the EU Presidency race there’s an intriguing blog this morning from the Telegraph’s Ben Brogan. He writes “… this is what I hear. Gordon Brown is still batting ..even though he could have pulled the plug, and is doing another round with the other EU leaders even now. His point to them is quite robust: after weeks of messing about with rumpy pumpy Belgians and…

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Is this what Cameron gets for abandoning the referendum?

Is this what Cameron gets for abandoning the referendum?

What will it do to the political climate? One of the things that we see repeatedly is that it’s often not the numbers in polls that matter but how the findings are covered in the media that has commissioned them. So on a morning when the Guardian is reporting its ICM poll with a sharp cut-back in the Tory lead the big slant is about “Cameron closing the deal“. This is based on non-voting questions about how respondents rated him…

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Labour move to highest ICM share since April

Labour move to highest ICM share since April

CON 42%(42) LAB 29%(25) LD 19%(21) OTHERS 10% (12) [LAB/CON 69% (59.5)] But they are still in the 20s with the Tories in the 40s The latest survey in the longest standing polling series in the UK – ICM in the Guardian – has some good news for Mr. Brown following Labour’s by election success in Glasgow last Thursday. Although the Tories are on a standstill at 42 Labour sees a sharp move upwards of four points. My guess is…

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Will Labour get an ICM and a MORI boost?

Will Labour get an ICM and a MORI boost?

Could the by-election have given them a lift? Most of the fieldwork for the weekend’s polls took place before news of Labour big victory in the by election came through. That won’t be the case with the two phone polls from ICM and MORI where the fieldwork started on Friday and finished last night. Generally polls that are undertaken in the immediate aftermath of by elections give the winner a boost if only because of the extra exposure in the…

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Could Cameron lose the Battle of Swaffam?

Could Cameron lose the Battle of Swaffam?

“Sorry, no, I have never said I’m anti-women. I have got absolutely nothing against women. Who cooks my lunch? Who cooks my dinner? How did my wonderful three children appear? Women, you can’t do without them. My god, take my wife.” What does she do for a living? “What does she do? She looks after me. Looks after the children. Runs the house.” The above is attributed to SW Norfolk Tory big-wig, Sir Jeremy Bagge, in a Telegraph interview by…

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20 years after the fall of CeauÅŸescu…

20 years after the fall of CeauÅŸescu…

Wikimedia Commons …is President Băsescu about to be toppled? Twenty years ago next month saw the bloodiest of the Eastern Europe revolutions of 1989, with the overthrow and execution of Romania’s leader Nicolae CeauÅŸescu and his wife Elena, and the takeover of power by the National Salvation Front, many of whose members had been communist officials. Today’s Romania is a very different place from its early 1990s counterpart, with the fledging democracy dominated by the NSF having settled down into…

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Are the Tories really most at risk from UKIP?

Are the Tories really most at risk from UKIP?

How less than one in five are ex-Tory voters This is the first part of some analysis I’ve been doing on the rise of “others” – UKIP, the BNP and the Greens – and the impact that they might have at the next general election. A big question to start with is where is UKIP support coming from? What can we find out from the polling data? The following numbers are based on the aggregation of all the relevant data…

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