politicalbetting.com

What are the implications of Blair’s statement? My first reaction to this afternoon’s statement is that it makes Gordon Brown’s task just a little bit harder. We are now in an eight or nine month countdown which, as I argued yesterday, makes it a little easier for other challengers to develop their campaigns and come into the race. The critical question remains – will Gordon face a serious challenge when the vote comes? Everything that likely contenders do in the…

Read More Read More

Is Tony trying to make Gordon fight for the job? From the acres of space devoted to the Labour leadership this morning there has been little on what to me is the key issue – that Tony is not playing ball over Gordon’s plan to get into No. 10 without having to fight a real contest. All the talk of ‘smooth transition’ seems to have been on the assumption that Tony Blair would do what he could to make the…

Read More Read More

Will there be another wheeze to keep the show going? One of my great sayings used to be “Nobody ever got rich betting against Tony Blair”. Certainly he has been in tight corners before and the money has piled in from punters on an early departure. Just three years ago, in the frenzy over the Hutton Inquiry following David Kelly’s death, Blair became odds on for a while to go before the end of September 2003. Then on one famous…

Read More Read More

Isn’t this how Michael Howard stopped David Davis? From my holiday apartment near Nice where my sole source of news for nearly a fortnight has been the internet on my pda phone I accept that I might be reading Labour’s leadership developments completely wrongly. But would it really help Gordon if Blair announced a fixed time-table for a July 2007 departure? What that would do, surely, is fire the starting pistol on a ten month leadership campaign which could see…

Read More Read More

The Tory leader’s strengths and weaknesses – Part 2 Following yesterday’s post on Cameron’s strengths today I look at some of the factors that are going to make David Cameron’s task that much harder. 1. The Shadow of Mrs Thatcher. For Cameron this is a double whammy. On one hand there are large sections of the electorate who might warm to the him but would never vote Tory because of continuing hostility caused by the Thatcher years. On the other…

Read More Read More

Would he still get it if polls showed a leadership rival in the lead? With the Telegraph and the Independent both having big articles this morning talking up a potential John Reid leadership bid could Gordon Brown’s chances of taking the top job be hit by opinion polls showing that he was behind a rival? For the Chancellor has not got a good record in leadership polls in spite of the efforts by his supporters to over-state the importance of…

Read More Read More

Could Blair be to Gordon what Heath was to Maggie? Tony Blair has been such a dominating figure in British politics for so long that it’s hard imagining what things are going to be like when he and Cherie have moved to Connaught Square and Gordon, assuming it is he, is the undisputed master at Number 10. Heath was still in his 50s when Maggie beat him in the 1975 leadership election and throughout her years he remained a vocal…

Read More Read More