The Tories up a point on a fortnight ago It’s multi-Gordons once again this morning but only half the number that accompanied the last poll, YouGov’s 10% lead, and one less than when the pollster, ICM, last carried out a survey two weeks ago. The fieldwork for the firm’s August survey for the Guardian finished four days ago on Thursday so is already a little out of date. It won’t have been affected by the Liverpool shooting which has been…
Is this putting the Tories back in the game? In an excellent post yesterday my nomination for political blogger of the year, the Labour-leaning Paul Linford, produced a potted history of crimes which, he argued have changed the political consensus. Running through Jamie Bulger in 1993 which arguably gave the then shadow home secretary, Tony Blair, heightened prominence, Linford touches on the political impact of the Dunblane massacre in 1995, the Philip Lawrence murder which is back in the headlines…
Would the train incident thwart any come-back plan? It’s August and yesterday we got what looks like becoming a hardy annual in the run-up to the Lib Dem conference – the Charles Kennedy come-back story. This year’s has been sparked off by his comments yesterday at Scotland’s “Festival of Politics” after he was asked if he was “..going to be the comeback kid?” According to the BBC report he replied: “When you have been the leader of a national political…
The Guardian’s August ICM survey should be out this weekend After two weeks without any national voting intention surveys – a period which has seen intense speculation about how the main parties are doing in the new political context – I am advised that we should see results from the Guardian’s August ICM “over the weekend”. That’s likely to mean either tomorrow or on Bank Holiday Monday. The paper’s uninterrupted polling series with ICM is the longest running in the…
Can the leadership be challenged without Labour paying a price? Aside from the dramatic rise in street violence the issue that’s dominating the political scene is the growing threat of a revolt within the wider Labour movement over GB’s decision not to have a referendum on the EU treaty. There’s a report this morning that at least 40 Labour MPs are calling for talks on the EU plan to be re-opened and a number of unions are gathering forces ahead…
In the absence of any polls, particularly from the Lib Dem unfriendly YouGov, there’s been a change in the favourite on Betfair’s general election outcome market. The chart shows the betting odds converted into implied probabilities. The current favoured outcome, at 1.48/1 is a hung parliament with a Labour majority at 3/2. A Tory overall majority is out at nearly 4/1. I’ve just heard that Ipsos-Mori, in addition to their Sun poll a fortnight ago, will be doing their standard…
Could Nick Palmer be right about the next round of surveys? In a post last night Nick Palmer – the Labour MP for Broxtowe and the first of any party to contribute to Politicalbetting under his own name – made an extraordinary prediction about the next round of polls. This is what he wrote: “I think we can all agree the media stories this week are mostly helpful to the Tories, so do Tories here expect to be back in…
What do we think of the latest move? The Tory health cuts saga has taken a new turn with the party retracting the apology it found itself having to issue when inaccuracies were found on its list of hospitals at risk. The problem with getting specific, as they did yesterday, is that you can pick off each component and find somebody who will say that a particular service is not under threat. So rather than arguing about the big picture…