Or does it make Labour look weak? So there we have it. Exactly eight days after the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, announces his inheritance tax plan to the conference and Labour Alastair Darling follows suit with his own scheme. Would this have been in the Chancellor’s statement at all if the Tory plan had not given the party such a post-conference poll boost? Does it all look so obvious? Is it actually an admission that we’ve reached a stage where…
Did his comments about the polls sound convincing? The first stage of Brown’s fight-back started with his monthly press conference when, inevitably, he was pressured on the circumstances leading upto Saturday’s announcement. Later in the day he has the Iraq statement in the Commons followed by a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party. The big question, of course, is how is this going down with the public? Will Labour stem the flow to the Tories in the polls? The weekend…
Can he mount an effective fight-back from the election retreat? One of the things that we don’t really know about Gord is how he’ll respond when he is under fire. For almost throughout his career he has managed to avoid public situations where he’s faced a severe grilling. During his time at the Treasury Brown always stood back and let members of his team put themselves forward when the difficult issues, like the level of fraud in the tax credit…
Who is going to get the blame? Masses and masses of coverage in the papers this morning that won’t make comfortable reading at Number 10. Having skimmed most of them on the net the piece that seems the most wounding is from the usually loyal Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer. The headline says it all “They will call him Bottler Brown and it is going to hurt”. He writes: “This was not got up by the media. It was a…
Marginals said to be “patchy and extremely tight” We are going to have to wait until this evening before we see the first post-Blackpool opinion poll and that should be from the YouGov panel on this evening’s Channel 4 News. But according to Steve Richards in the Independent the prospect of an early election has receded following the Tory conference and reaction to Cameron’s speech. He notes that Brown’s “inner circle is understood to have become more cautious about an…
Should he have waited until he’d seen all the post-Blackpool polls? If we are to believe the Guardian this morning everything is now set for an announcement on Tuesday that there will be a general election on November 1st. A whole series of actions and other measures are being set in place to allow the time-table and it’s beginning to look like Europe in August 1914 when the momentum of activity would have made it almost impossible to stop the…
Two polls give Labour doubt digit leads Back in May and June I was among a number of commentators who were saying that we would really have to wait until November before we would get a clear view of how the new leadership at Number 10 had changed the political environment. Well it is looking as though that November suggestion might be when the general election itself takes place. The polls have moved so firmly and decisively in Labour’s favour…
What margin would trigger a visit to see the Queen? For all the bravado, leaking, teasing and wind-ups Gord is not going to risk his premiership on the basis of current polling evidence. What he needs to see is how the public react after they’ve been exposed to the Tories and, in particular, to the big speech by David Cameron. For much of the poll movement to Labour has been driven by the almost total news blackout from the Tories…