BBC News Would it have been worse without the coalition deal? In a Radio 4 interview to be broadcast on Sunday night the LD leader and deputy PM, Nick Clegg, asserts that his party would be in a worse position in the polls if they had not entered into the coalition agreement with the Tories. If they had stood aside then nobody would be taking any notice of the party now. The BBC report goes on: “Being in government meant…
Guardian How can there now be a full-blooded Tory campaign? A big political story in the papers this morning is the coverage of the joint political press conference by Tory chair, Baroness Warsi and the LD cabinet minister, Chris Huhne. This was a joint move to attack Labour to try put the blame on what the coalition is having to do on the former government. For me the greater significance of this is not what they said but what it…
Should he speak at the September conference? There was a suggestion six weeks ago that David Cameron and Nick Clegg should speak at each other’s autumn conferences, That seems to have been put to one side. Instead we have a report in the coalition – loving Daily Mail that the foreign secretary William Hague is being lined up to speak. The idea, apparently is that he should make a witty speech – A source is quoted as saying: ‘It is…
Is Balls paying the price for supporting Gordon? Judging by the opinion polls, the list of nominations and the number of endorsements then the one near certainty about the race for the Labour leadership is that Ed Balls isn’t going to win. On all the measures he is a long way behind and it’s hard to see what could change in the final four weeks before the ballots go out. Yet if you look at what the five have said…
Would this beef up his party’s fire-power? Yesterday I was having a natter with someone well connected within the Lib Dems who came up with an interesting idea to help Nick Clegg and the yellows with their current predicament – allocate one of the party’s five cabinet places to the former leader, Paddy Ashdown. An ideal position, given Ashdown’s former role as High Representative in Bosnia and early career as a soldier could be to replace the increasingly detached Liam…
Pollster/publication Date CON LAB LD YouGov/Sun Times 30/07/10 42 38 12 YouGov/Sun 26/07/10 42 35 15 MORI/Reuters 25/07/10 40 38 14 ICM/Guardian 25/07/10 38 34 19 YouGov/Sun 21/07/10 44 35 13 ComRes/Independent 27/06/10 40 31 18 YouGov/Sunday Times 25/06/10 43 36 16 ICM/Sunday Telegraph 24/06/10 41 35 16 YouGov/Sun 24/06/10 43 34 17 Is this a reaction to the Robinson programme? The latest daily poll from the YouGov panel has the Lib Dems down to one of their lowest shares…
Do more say they were Yellow than actually were? We all know the big story of the general election and the polls. When the votes were counted the 23.6% GB share that the Lib Dems chalked up was much smaller than all the pre-election polls. At one point YouGov had Clegg’s party with a four point lead on 34%. Yet eleven weeks on from May 6th an interesting trend has developed. When pollsters ask how people voted they invariably find…
What do the Lib Dems do about evaporating support? Nick Clegg may have brought the Liberal Democrats into Government, but his party can only defy political gravity for so long. As one colleague said to me recently ‘let’s not forget that the Lib Dems won more seats led by a drunk Charlie Kennedy than it did with a sober Nick Clegg’. The drama of the coalition has in many ways masked the failure of the Liberal Democrats to meet expectations…