Will the Sun’s move dispirit the party even more? Labour’s big remaining hope as it entered the conference season was that Brown’s speech would exceed the low expectations and provide the platform for some sort of recovery. Last year the PM’s “no time for a novice” phrase caught the mood of the time and for the final quarter of 2008 Cameron’s Tories were on the back foot. A lot was riding on being able to do the same again –…
You can see more of Marf’s work at LondonSketchbook.com Meanwhile we now have the YouGov post speech poll – the first figure is after the speech – the second is before it. It should be noted that the sample was simply people who watched the speech – it was not demographically or politically weighted and as Anthony Wells at UKPollingReport observes “People who watched his speech are likely to be a lot more politically aware, a lot more well disposed…
Will there be another “novice” put down? This is 29 year old Kirsty McNeill, the PM’s adviser in charge of external affairs, who is said to have written last year’s conference speech with the memorable “this is no time for a novice” rhetoric. She’s recently had a promotion at Number 10 but if Gord liked what she did last year then she’s bound to be involved again this time. This is the last big one before the general election and…
Why not spend the money when there aren’t the distortions? One of the things to understand about the conference season is that they take place in a very artificial media environment. There’s a long-standing convention that these annual show-piece events are covered by the broadcasters almost to the exclusion of other political news. That was why Brown’s trip to Iraq in the middle of the 2007 Tory conference went down so badly. It was seen as a deliberate spoiler and…
CON 39% (-1) LAB 29% (+5) LD 20%(-1) Are we just seeing the conference effect? Labour get a massive boost in this evening’s daily tracker from YouGov for Sky News. The comparisons are with the tracker poll done last Friday. On these figures we are in hung parliament territory and the Tories would be seriously worried if this did not edge down a bit after the conference. Brown, of course, had lots of exposure over the weekend and the Tories…
Will this be Osborne’s eye-catching announcement? A couple of weeks ago at an impromptu question and answer session in Bedford the Tory Chairman, Eric Pickles, let slip that there’d be a big announcement at their conference about pensions. Since then I’ve been pondering over what this could be and the thought struck me that this will be Osborne’s 2009 big announcement. For we have sort of got used to his Monday conference sessions and no doubt we all recall his…
Will this make life easier for Gordon or not? There’s news this morning of a big polling development, the first product of which is seen in the panel above – the YouGov/Sky News daily tracker for the party conference season. This shows day by day how opinion changed during the last week and how the “conference effect” seems to decline as the news agenda moves on. This is unlike normal tracker polls which have generally involved only 250 fresh interviews…
Is this how “a fighter” (his words) strides across the stage? The newspaper front pages (see here) are not good for the PM this morning and the most striking element is the above picture of Brown featured in the Guardian and Independent. It reminds me of the shots of Michael Foot at the Remembrance Day event in the early 80s wearing his duffel coat. It created an image that seemed to sum up his leadership. Looking back overnight the significance…