PB March 12 2009 Should we be looking at Labour’s deputy again? Back in March, when Harriet was the 100/30 favourite, I suggested that then might be the moment to cross of her off the least for the Labour leadership. One of my arguments was her poor showing in a YouGov poll of Labour members a week or so earlier in which she did not come out too well. Since then we’ve had the rise and and rise of Alan…
AntiFrank speculates on “the unknown unknowns”? Chess is a trivial game. I do not make this statement to annoy chess players: it is a mathematical statement. All information is available to both players throughout, the rules are predetermined and in theory at least all possible outcomes are known. Unlike chess, bridge is a non-trivial game. The different players have different information at different times. Each player must make his decisions not on the basis of perfect information but on the…
Is this like Thatcher’s “.. no such thing as society” comment? There’s been a flurry of comment over David Cameron’s comment in his BBC “Westminster Hour” interview in which he suggested that the Tories would run the country like Tesco and Sainsbury’s if they get to power. The exact quote was according to the Sun: “In the situation we will face if we win the election, a budget deficit of maybe 14 per cent, we must find ways to cut…
Is it going to be as bad for Labour as 1997 was for the Tories? Reading too much into by-election results is a very dangerous game. There aren’t very many of them and where and when they take place is close to a random process. However, having said all that, there’s one aspect of the recent Norwich North by-election result which could be an important pointer and which hasn’t had much coverage: the scale of the collapse of support for…
CONHome But details are scarce and the pollster isn’t registered The first news of this poll of the 30 most marginal seats has come on ConservativeHome and details are very scarce. Firstly although the pollster has carried out at least one political poll in the UK before it is not listed as a member of the British Polling Council which makes me, for one, feel a touch uncomfortable. Secondly the report that we’ve got does not tell is when the…
A new service for supporters of the site At the start of June about 60 PBers very kindly made donations to support the technical infrastructure of the site. In total nearly £3,000 was raised and this has enabled us to make things more robust. As a way of saying thank you we are setting up something called the “PB Early Birds”. This will be a special alert service for when we have news of an attractive betting opportunity. As those…
YouGov November 4th 2005 Could the PM, like Davis in 2005, have ended up on top? Yesterday while we were getting contradictory statements on a Brown-Cameron TV debate I dug up the above YouGov poll up for a national paper which had commissioned me to do a piece on the main contenders’ chances. The November 2005 poll I found was of Tory party members does raise questions over whether Cameron would have been the overwhelming debate winner with Brown as…
Ladbrokes How many Labour MPs will there be in the next parliament? For those who are uncomfortable with the risks of spread betting the main way of betting on the number of seats the parties will get in the general election is here – which several of the bookies offer but unlike mostLadbrokes keeps it up almost all the time. Is there any value? How difficult is it betting with such small segments? My sense is that this is quite…