A guest article by Peter the Punter Mediums are utterly useless. They have yet to give me a single winning tip I couldn’t have worked out for myself. Messages from the other side of the betting counter can however be helpful. Although they are unlikely to reveal the winner of the next race at Kempton, they may nevertheless contain something every bit as useful to punters. I recently had dinner with an odds compiler from a major firm and although…
Could optimism and praise help him take back the initiative? We are going through an extraordinary period and Labour supporters are, no doubt, pinching themselves to confirm that Gordon’s first weeks are not a dream. By all accounts the public response to the way he’s handled his first three big crises has been enormously positive and if this wasn’t the poll-free holiday period Labour would surely have been consolidating the initial big leads. So what does Cameron do? Each step…
Does the Guardian have no sense of history? I think that the invasion and fall of France in May 1940 followed by Dunkirk, and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force that Churchill had to face probably rank some way ahead of the flooding, Glasgow airport and foot and mouth. While not quite on that scale Harold Wilson’s first month of his 1974 government was pretty horrendous with the aftermath of the miners’ strike, the oil crisis and Northern Ireland….
Can you predict the date and the pollster? With Labour having established a significant margin in all the main polls since Gordon moved in can you predict when, if ever before the general election, a poll will show Brown’s party to be either level-pegging or with a deficit? In the comment thread below please state, to the day, the actual date when this will happen and as a tie-breaker can you name the pollster? If you think that this is…
The by elections help us to another record breaking month July was another record breaking month on Politicalbetting. We had a total of 759,452 hits which was only the second time we have been above the three-quarters of a million mark. The last month when this happened was in May when the total finished up at more than 772,000. Looking at the daily data, parts of which are recorded here, we got a huge boost on the day of and…
Is Gordon following the plan of Blair’s former pollster? The revelation in the Daily Mirror this morning of a 2005 paper written by the ex-Blair pollster and major architect of NuLab, Philip Gould, raises the questions – is Gordon following the strategy and, if so, does this provide further evidence that an early general election is on the cards? Certainly what has happened in the past month seems to fit with what Gould was advising two years ago. This is…
What do we think of the Electoral Commission’s conclusions? As the BBC is reporting this morning all web and phone voting pilots should be halted according to a report from the Electoral Commission on the voting experiments that took place in parts of England in May 3rd. Then there were a series of trials including internet and phone voting, electronic counting, insisting that voters sign for their forms, and making town centre facilities available ahead of polling day so people…
My nomination – Paul Linford From the moment that West Bromwich MP, the unlovely Tom Watson, visited Gordon, Sarah and family at their Fife home during the first week of September the 2006/07 political year has been dominated by one subject – the Labour succession. For from that meeting Watson went on to resign his ministerial position apparently threatening a whole wave unless Tony stood down. It was unsubtle, it was brutal but it was highly effective. We then went…