Will he really be out of the cabinet by Tuesday? For the fourth weekend in succession it looks as though the Lib Dem energy secretary, Chris Huhne, is going to figure prominently in the Sunday papers. The business with speeding point allegations has prompted a lot of coverage and we seem to have a pattern – what’s predicted on some websites never quite lives up to the billing when the papers arrive. For punters there’s been a lively betting on…
How likely is brinkmanship to go wrong? The continuing struggle within the coalition over the fate or ultimate nature of the NHS reforms is as good an indicator as is necessary that the May elections and AV referendum really did mark a watershed in the Coalition’s history. The Lib Dems, as Clegg promised, have been much more vocal and active in pressing their case, even where – as with the NHS bill – it reverses their previous stance. This approach…
Daily Mail How serious is his resignation threat? According to the Daily Mail the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, is threatening to quit over his NHS reform plan. The paper’s Jason Groves says that Lansley has told the PM that he would reject a face-saving plan to switch him to another role and if it came to it would quit the cabinet. The report goes on: “In an outspoken public intervention ..he said driving through the health reforms was now his…
How do the reds get a look in when it’s a Blue-Yellow spat? There’s a poignant piece by Sunny Hundal on Liberal Conspiracy about the challenges for Labour when all the political focus is on the coalition partners. He wrote: “At 9am yesterday morning, Labour shadow health secretary John Healey gave a speech calling for the NHS bill to be scrapped because it essentially meant the end of the NHS..At around 11am Nick Clegg gave a press conference and pretty…
The documentary you cannot miss One of the great “must-watch” political documentaries of recent times was the on BBC4 channel on Wednesday night on the mighty tussle between two grammar school boys who went to Oxford and fought four general elections against other. Two of those elections were pivotal – 1970 when against all the odds and polling Heath won a majority and February 1974 when the Tories went to the country in the middle of the miners’ strike in…
From the front page of tomorrow’s Telegraph The clip is all we’ve got at the moment but if the headline is borne out in the story then it looks like good news for the energy secretary and bad news for those who’ve been betting on him to be the next cabinet minister out. Mike Smithson
Will Labour find cold comfort in the IDS comparison? The Ipsos-MORI data on Ed Miliband is getting a lot of coverage today and I thought that this chart puts the “ready to be PM” responses into an historical context. It shows the trend with all opposition leaders from Tony Blair onwards and, interestingly the man who was to lead Labour to three election victories had a positive rating of 59 to 28 six months after he took over the job….
Is there a lesson to be learned from Scotland? My biggest betting wins of 2011 were against the SNP taking most seats in the Scottish Parliament election earlier in the month. I started piling on towards the end of March when I became convinced that the leaderships ratings of Alex Salmond and Iain Grey were a far better pointer to the outcome than the voting intention polls. At the time Labour was in the lead in almost all the polls…