Won’t this all be forgotten about in a few months? On the face of it this should be the moment for UKIP. The build-up has been going on for months, the Murdoch press has been winding up the rhetoric and now the treaty is finally happening. Yet according to the latest poll, the one in last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph from ICM, a paltry 3 people (NOT percent) said that their choice was the anti-EU party. Surely if this was the…
What’s the chance of either Dave or Gord being ousted? One of the bets I placed in the immediate aftermath of the Brown “no election” declaration was in Betfair’s “Next General Election – party leaders†market. Here you have to predict which of the Ming, Gord and Dave will still be there on polling day and at the time I suggested betting against, by laying, all three still being in post. That bet seemed to offer the most options and…
Or are Labour still on course for a fourth term? The last couple of weeks have been among the most eventful in recent British politics, with the election that never was, the “magpie” pre-budget report, Brown’s mauling at PMQs and the polls changing rapidly from an 11-point Labour lead to a 7-point Conservative one. The key question is whether we have reached a tipping point and it’s all downhill for Labour from now on, with Brown following Callaghan and Douglas-Home…
Do his polling advisers need to delve deeper? In trying to explain how Gordon Brown and Labour have got into their current mess there appears to have been one driving force – the massive Labour poll leads that at one stage touched 14%. The party believed that everything was going its way and, inevitably, there was pressure to convert the apparent surge in support into a fourth successive Labour victory. Yet were the poll leads ever as big as they…
But those 40% plus Tory shares should be worrying Too often, I think, those with a passion for following the fortunes of our great parties seem to expect instant reactions from the polls to the events they see daily in the papers and on their TV screens. So Brown has been having a torrid few days and yet Labour is at 38% in the latest Mori poll trailing by just 3%. That could have been a lot worse and I…
Will Alan Johnson come under pressure to resign? In what’s been a dreadful week for Labour, there’s more bad news for the government today with the 90 deaths from the C difficile bug at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. Health secretary Alan Johnson has described the deaths as “scandalous” and has told the trust to withold any severance pay to the chief executive who resigned last week. A police investigation has begun, with the possibility that the trust may…
Why can’t Gordon “do†sincerity? The above screen-shot is from the weekend’s Andrew Marr interview and shows the expression on Brown’s face the moment he first started to explain why there was not going to be an election this year. Just imagine how the political scene would have looked this morning if Brown had taken a different approach and Alastair Darling’s pre-budget report had made no mention of the Tory and Lib Dem taxation ideas? Just imagine what the reaction…
How the papers are reporting the “Magpie Budget” As I’ve discussed here many times my main form of political betting is to “buy” and “sell” the number of seats that Labour will get at the next election. Because this is spread-betting you can realise your profits or cut your losses at any time. You can also operate without having to lock up any cash up by opening a credit account. The critical thing, if you want to end up in…