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BBC Why has Darling broken the long-standing convention? Lots of talk tonight about the timing of Darling’s pay freeze announcement and it, apparently, breaking the long-standing convention that governments don’t do things like this during party conferences. It’s comes on the eve of George Osborne’s big speech and the suggestion is that ministers planned it tonight to cause maximum disruption to the Tories. I wondered whether we are seeing a payback for the Sun’s announcement of its change in political…

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****For discussion on the Greek General Election Click here**** ****This thread for UK Politics only**** What do this pair think of the new system? In view of the heated discussion on the previous thread I thought I would publish comments by Professor Colin Rallings and Professor Michael Thrasher of the University of Plymouth and Co-Directors of the Local Government Chronicle Elections Centre. They are also the academics who produced the Press Association guide to the results of the last election…

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This was a screen shot I took of the Cameron interview with Andrew Marr and shows someone who was under some pressure. He didn’t seem to be his normal self. The questioning was tough – but then he is hoping to be prime minister in a few months time. I thought it was one of his less good performances. Mike Smithson

What does this mean for the Tories? At the second time of asking, the Irish electorate appear to have given their assent to the Lisbon Treaty. Being parochial for a moment, where does this leave people and parties in the UK? The Conservatives are likely to be most affected, partly because Europe plays bigger in the Tory Party than in the others and partly because the party’s position has a large amount of uncertainty contained within it if the Treaty…

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Out at last – the PoliticsHome Marginals MegaPoll We’ve now got the latest PolticsHome marginals poll which covers 238 constituencies with a sample of 33,610 voters. Apart from the scale what makes this different is that there is a two-stage voting intention question to try to tease out the potential for tactical voting. The 2008 version was based on fieldwork at the end of July of that year when Labour was at it absolute lowest so today’s findings suggest that…

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CON 41% (+1) LAB 29% (+3) LD 17%(-3) But stand by for some bigger polling developments tonight Sorry not to have put this up earlier – but I’ve been working on some really big polling news that hopefully I’ll be able to report later. Here is the Friday YouGov tracker based on fieldwork carried out last night and this morning. It shows a Labour recovery and the Tories putting on a point. So the bad news of the Sun’s defection…

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CON 37% (-3) LAB 30% (+1) LD 21%(+3) But most of fieldwork took place BEFORE the Sun’s news? Peter Kellner has just been in touch with news of today YouGov tracker poll. He emphasises that “most fieldwork reflects impact of yesterday evening TV news coverage but not this mornings papers. Tomorrow’s figures will measure full impact of media coverage, Sun switch etc”. It’s important to note that the numbers we are seeing each are essentially a reaction to the news…

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