Will the PM’s £2.7bn gamble pay off? In the previous thread we looked at the latest betting on Crewe and Nantwich where the best you can get is 0.21/1 on the Conservative victory. I think that is going to happen but betting at that price – not my normal way of doing things. I am coming to a view that Gordon Brown has wagered so much on next Thursday that if Labour is defeated by a significant margin then the…
Screen shot from the Daily Politics What’ll be the polling impact of today’s media blitz? It has been very hard over the past eight or nine hours to avoid Gordon Brown. He’s gone from one TV or radio studio to another doing a big series of interviews to try to seize back the initiative. But will it have helped in the polls and at the Crewe and Nantwich by election? How will all this be going down with the public….
Could the revised tax plan stem the Tory surge? The chart shows the changes in the Labour betting price for Crewe and Nantwich, expressed as an implied probability, during a day which has seen the government trying to get out of the hole it has dug itself into over the 10% tax rate. Clearly Brown and his team were thinking of next week’s election when they decided to make the statement to try to shoot this particular fox. The only…
Is this the most likely “end-game” scenario? Whenever the question of the manner of Gordon’s eventual departure is discussed three different possibilities are raised: that he’ll go after leading Labour to an inglorious defeat at the hands of David Cameron; that he’ll be ousted in a bloody coup; or that he will, like other Prime Ministers before him, stand down on health grounds. Only a few have suggested that he might come to recognise that his leadership is undermining his…
Are Labour’s chances as bad as the media is suggesting? This weekend hundreds and maybe thousands of activists from the main parties will be heading to Crewe and Nantwich for a big couple of days of campaigning ahead of the critical by election a week on Thursday. The weather’s good, the constituency’s road and rail links are excellent and, most of all, Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems have each got something to prove in this key test of…
Has the Sun switched from MORI following the Mayoral outcome? A key thing that polling does, apart from to give some idea about the outcome of a future general election, is to help create the environment in which the political process operates. As we have seen so often the pressure on party leaders can be driven by poor polling numbers. For there’s little doubt that shocking polls for Labour, like the one in this morning’s Sun, can affect the whole…
Is this the woman who could turn Labour’s fortunes around? I don’t claim to understand the intricacies of Labour party internal politics but after pondering over the past few days I have come up with a couple of names of people I believe could turn round voters views of the party and make the next general election less of the disaster than it looks at the moment. What’s needed is a different style and a different tone and a leader…
Some depressing words for Labour supporters in Polly Toynbee’s Tuesday Guardian column this morning. After having this to say about May 22nd “..for the Conservatives are no longer the stupid party. Watch them win the Crewe and Nantwich byelection, easy…” she goes on:- “…It is Labour that has become the stupid party – dumb, directionless, depressing. That’s why the voters gave them that 24% sucker punch: it wasn’t about ideology, it was about basic political competence. As the Conservatives unfurl…