Isn’t now the time to draw some distance? Two of my favourite political writers, Allegra Stratton in the Guardian and James Forsyth over at the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, have picked up a tentative alliance that they believe is being woven between Jon Cruddas and James Purnell, with a view to the Labour leadership. Leaving aside the technicality that there is no vacancy, and no election may be called for over a year, all eyes it seems are on the…
General election seat betting
David Herdson’s first post as guest editor In another recession, in another country, in another decade, an aide to a presidential candidate once declared that one of the three key themes to their campaign was “the economy, stupidâ€. In fact, it was the key issue; no-one remembers the other two (which is ironic, as one was “don’t forget healthcareâ€). The candidate was of course Bill Clinton and he duly went on to defeat the incumbent president later that year. However,…
Take the 5/1 that he’ll have to pay some back William Hill have just put out a press release about a new market on whether Harrow East Labour MP and minister, Tony McNulty, will have to pay back some of the £60,000 of taxpayers’ money he claimed for the mortgage on a house he owns in his Harrow constituency where his parent live. You can get 5/1 that he will have to pay at least some it back. As has…
Have we been overlooking a political heavyweight? One of my very favourite political TV dramas was the splendid ‘House of Cards’ trilogy starring Ian Richardson as the deliciously malevolent Francis Urquhart PM. I bought the DVD boxset a couple of years ago, but was heartened to see that it was being repeated on cable channels in the last couple of weeks. The first installment (‘House of Cards’) is my favourite, and the finale (‘The Final Cut’) is wonderfully tragic, but…
UKPolling Report Should the LDs back the seat winners or the vote winners? The above vote shares are within the margins of error of current polling and represent what would appear to be most most unfair outcome possible to the general election – Labour getting less than a third of the vote yet just having more seats in spite of being nearly six points behind. The line that has come out of the Lib Dems is that they “wouldn’t oppose”…
CON 41(nc) LAB 31(nc) LD 17(nc) The March YouGov survey for the Daily Telegraph is just out and the numbers are exactly the same as those in the Sunday Times survey from the pollster a week and a half ago. There’s not really much to say about it. The key differences between the firm and the other pollsters is that all its surveys are restricted to members of its polling panel – and “certainty to vote” is never used as…
Your chance to nominate the best contributions As many regulars will know the number of posts on PB since we started in 2004 is just about to hit the million mark. We are currently just over 18,000 short of the magic number which should be reached in the next two to three weeks. So of all the the comments that you have seen are there any that really stand out? Are there any that could be worthy of the title…