What do we make of Paul Waugh’s post? This was posted by Paul Waugh on his Evening Standard blog within the past hour:- “….In the last few hours, the rumours have been swirling around again that a Cabinet minister could quit in protest at Gordon’s leadership. The plotters have certainly asked a sympathetic minister to do so – but whether he will do so is another matter. When I just confronted one Cabinet minister – who had been described in…
Who’s got the strongest mandate? Labour or the Tories The above seat calculation is from UKPollingReport and shows what happens if you put the vote shares of C39-L33.3-LD20 into the seat calculator. The outcome, based on a uniform national swing calculation gives Labour the most commons seat on fewer than a third of the votes and well behind the Tories on 39%. So in these circumstances what should the Lib Dems do? Nick Clegg seeks to answer the whole hung…
Will Tory fundraising make victory more likely? Perhaps the key element of the first day of the campaign was the realisation that the Tories have got a lot more money to play with and are ready to invest heavily in outdoor advertising. We got the first taste yesterday with the NHS poster campaign said to be costing £400,000. What a contrast with Labour’s news in the Times this morning that it is facing potential bankruptcy and is expecting to be…
What does this say about current surveys? The table above shows all the published opinion polls in the January before the last election in May 2005 and compares them with what actually happened. First thing to note is the methodological changes that three of the firms have made which makes direct comparisons more difficult. YouGov introduced a new party ID weighting structure to deal with their pre-May 2005 tendency to over-state the Lib Dems at the expense of Labour. ComRes…
And could Cameron be creating hostages to fortune? Wow. What a busy morning. Is it going to be like this right through to the general election day whenever that is? What’s caught my eye is this Tory NHS poster and the way all the emphasis is put on Cameron – “I’ll cut the deficit. Not the NHS” Is this going to be a common element in other campaign material? Clearly this has been through the focus groups and reflects what…
Could my December 2008 speculation come about? Back in December 2008 I put forward what I described as a “plan for Clegg” in the event that the Tories ended up with many more votes at the general election but behind Labour on seats. Such an outcome is highly possible if the gap between the parties gets down to five or six percent. On the one hand Clegg would find it hard with his own MPs and activists to deal with…
Is it smart to deny the blindingly obvious? The interviewing trait where Mr.Brown is at his most vulnerable is when he seeks to deny something that is clearly the case. Less charitable people than me might use the word “porkie”. The problem is that he does this when it is so obvious Thus when it was apparent almost to the entire country in October 2007 that a factor in deferring the planned early election was the sudden change in Labour’s…
How did we rate Brown’s Marr performance? So there we have it – Gordon Brown’s big interview on the Marr programme on BBC1 and what looks like the first round of the campaign. I think a lot of work has gone on to to get him to this stage. He was much more fluid than usual and had some well-thought out sound-bites and arguments. He looked and sounded fairly confident. Where he was at his weakest was when Marr challenged…