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(This is a post from Robert Smithson, not Mike Smithson!) Electoral Calculus says a Conservative majority of 26.. Anthony Wells reckons it results in a 12 seat majority.. Hill & Knowlton has it as No Overall Control.. But could it really be 150 Tory majority? Yes. Because traditional election forecasting tools are flawed. Electoral Calculus, and the rest, use Unified National Swing as the bedrock of their analysis. But this has a fundamental defect: it assumes parties pile up votes…

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Was it BJ4BW that started the rot? With the Norwich by election likely to add to Labour’s woes I thought it might be timely to look back to last December – less than eight months ago – when everything seemed so different for Gordon and his ministers. Just look at the December polls above and see how close they were getting. Labour’s share was solidly in the mid-30s and the picture was the same across all the firms. While the…

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Get your money on before they take it down William Hill have just emailed me – “William Hill expect the electorate of Norwich North to shun the By Election and offer 1/2 that turnout will be lower than at the last General Election and 6/4 that it will be higher” The 1/2 that it will be lower than the general election is by far the best political bet of the year. I cannot recall a by election where the turnout…

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Is there a mechanism for delaying by-elections? News from the BBC indicates that Chris Ostrowski, the Labour candidate in Thursday’s by-election in Norwich North, has collapsed at home and been taken to hospital with suspected Swine Flu. Firstly, I’m sure we all wish him a full and speedy recovery – hospitalisation denotes a degree of seriousness, and I have no doubt that partisan feeling can be put aside to wish him the very best. That said, this could be significant…

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Is this about McBride, or the Guardian v Coulson? The interview of Damien McBride in today’s Guardian Media section is an immediate New Entry in the canon of rehabilitative interviews. The full gamut of human emotions is put on display – personal horror, regret, resignation – a truly masochistic apology, topped with remorse and the inevitable father-analogy for Brown. But the mea maxima culpa covers only half of the interview – from there we have various reasons and side-swipes: his…

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How’s this version going to go down at Number 10? There’s a must-read column by Julian Glover in the Guardian this morning in which he tries to unpack those critical few weeks last autumn when the banking system seemed on the point of collapse. The following gives a sense of it:- “….The turning point came on Friday 10 October, a day of market panic. Over the next few days the Treasury engineered its emergency part nationalisation. Few would can deny…

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Why aren’t Labour using by-elections as practice? There can’t be many Labour supporters who were glad to hear that Ian Gibson had resigned forcing a by-election in Norwich North. They might not have been much happier at the prospect of fighting the SNP for Michael Martin’s old seat either. Both are potential losses for the Government, so it should be a case of finding silver linings. The only benefit to by-elections where you can only lose or hold on (with…

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Where’s the upper limit to Tory ambitions? Yesterday’s opinion polls showed the figures returning to something like the position they were in immediately following the local and European elections in June – yesterday’s YouGov poll produced similar results to one on 7 June which had a Con/Lab/LD split of 40/24/18 and a ComRes poll of 12 June had a split of 38/22/20. In each case, all the comparable figures are within 2% between now and then. So, not much change, although…

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