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Why I’m betting again that Blair will survive Yet another week goes by and Tony Blair is still there doing what he’s always been brilliant at when things get rough – changing the media agenda. After the carefully concerted Gordon Brown barrage in the immediate aftermath of the local election results, a brace of poor opinion polls and probably the toughest PMQs of his nine year tenure Lucky Tony is just ploughing on finding other things to dominate the headlines….

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Is it all down to how the question is asked? With a Labour leadership contesting looking more imminent there’s a lot more attention being put on polls showing how people would vote if the leading contender, Gordon Brown, was up against David Cameron. Surpisingly there’s a big difference between the main pollsters. Taking all the surveys when this was asked since the new Tory leader took office these are the average changes in the CON-LAB margin comparing Cameron-Brown against the…

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“…and the winner is….” As one reader of this site picked up a few days ago, the winner was Lewis Baston, who correctly predicted the outcome of 26 out of the 32 contests in London. If he’d like to e-mail me on sean@grahamfear.co.uk then I’ll arrange for Amazon to e-mail him his prize. Overall, no one performed badly, (the lowest score was 18), and almost all of the entries scored in the range 21-24 (I scored 23). John O’Sullivan deserves…

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While normally Politicalbetting is devoted to serious topics – gambling, politics, that kind of thing – I thought regular readers should know that today is Mike Smithson’s birthday. So, please all join with me in wishing him the happiest of birthdays. Thanks, Robert

Could the 2005 switchers go back to Labour? With Ming Campbell waking up this morning to the poorest reviews of his short Lib Dem leadership a question the party has not really faced up to is the possible big loss of support when Tony Blair finally goes. For the person the party can most thank for what they achieved at the General Election and maintaining their support in most surveys ever since has been the Prime Minister. Yet judging by…

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Is this the Achilles heel of the Chancellor’s leadership ambitions? FACT: Since December 6th 2005, the date of Cameron’s election, there has not been a single poll where the Chancellor was doing better than his party when the question of “Who would you vote for if Gordon Brown was Labour leader?” was asked. Similarly I cannot find a single poll in three years before Cameron became Tory leader where the Chancellor was doing worse than his party when the same…

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Bad news for Blair – even worse for Brown As predicted here first thing this morning the May Populus survey for tomorrow’s Times has some pretty sensational figures showing one of the biggest turnarounds ever from a pollster that weights samples by declared past vote. The figures are with changes on April: CON 38 (+4): LAB 30 (-6): LD 20(-1). This is the biggest Tory lead ever recorded by the pollster. What is spectacular about this survey is that it…

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Will tomorrow’s survey have bad news for Blair? If the Populus monthly poll for the Times is following its normal schedule then the May survey should be out tomorrow. The interviews will have been taking place over the weekend while all the speculation and talk of a Labour civil war was dominating the air waves. Often surveys that take place in such a heated atmosphere produce extraordinary results and the Times has a reputation for running its polls big. So…

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