Will we see a new relationship between Dave and Gord? If it had not been postponed because of yesterday’s tragic death David Cameron and Gordon Brown would have been meeting later today at Number 10 for the formal unveiling of a portrait of the last Tory PM but one. The organisation of this event had been marked by extraordinary bickering and an apparent effort by Brown first not to have Cameron there at all and then, once that became impossible,…
guardian.co.uk But are the Tories right to back Brown? On the day the day that Mrs Thatcher returns to Number 10 for the unveiling of a portrait it is perhaps ironic that one part of the public sector that she decreed was a privatisation too far – the Post Office – should be causing so much difficulty for Mr. Brown and his government. The Guardian reports today that senior cabinet figures, David Miliband, and Alan Johnson have voiced concern and…
How’s this going to play ahead of the election? The real danger of Jack Straw’s announcement that he’s using his veto to stop cabinet minutes on the Iraq war decision being made available under the Freedom of Information Act is that it could open up the whole episode as a political issue once again. Even though it’s nearly six years since it all happened Ministers have managed to fend off calls for an inquiry into the issue, which was so…
UK Polling Report Is the outcome much closer than it appears? There will be 650 members of the next house of commons and if David Cameron’s Conservatives are going to win a majority then they will need a total of 325 seats or more. And if you input the numbers from today’s Guardian ICM poll into the UKPollingReport you get a projected total of 353 seats – or 28 above the magic number. This gives a comfortable overall majority of…
Guardian.co.uk What if this idea starts to take hold? One of the great weapons that editors can use to influence events is in choosing the questions that go into the opinion polls that they commission. Then, when they have the numbers, they can highlight specific findings which might fit with what the paper wants to achieve. So what are we to make of the Guardian’s splash this morning – leading on the numbers that are most damaging to Brown’s leadership?…
Could over-stating Labour be a thing of the past? John Rentoul in his latest column for the IoS makes some observations about the polls which I believe are out of date and could give a misleading view of what will happen at the next election. He writes: “…Of course, the quirks of the system mean that the Conservative share of the vote has to be eight percentage points larger than Labour’s to win a Commons majority. But I suspect that…
Would hurting the Tories come before his own career? In May last year I suggested that a possible outcome to Labour’s leadership saga might be that Gordon would fall on his sword if he felt that bringing in someone new would make life tougher for the Tories. At the time I wrote: “Only a few have suggested that he might come to recognise that his leadership is undermining his party against the dreaded Tories and that he will just fall…
Could Brown rue the day he made the ONS independent? When historians come to examine the final period of Mr. Brown’s career and Labour’s losses in the 2009/2010 general election will the decision to create the UK Statistics Authority and make the Office of National Statistics independent be seen as the decisive error? For yet again this morning the big news in several of the papers stems from official statistics that are hugely embarrassing to the government – numbers that…