What will today’s news do to YouGov’s daily tracker? In trying to assess the political influence of the Sun’s switch Labour MP, Nick Palmer, made this astute comment on the previous thread:- “..It occurs to me that the daily YouGovs are going to give us an excellent opportunity to test the power of the Sun endorsement to shift things. The YouGov taken today and reported tomorrow will show the impact of the speech plus a little bit of Sun. The…
Will the Sun’s move dispirit the party even more? Labour’s big remaining hope as it entered the conference season was that Brown’s speech would exceed the low expectations and provide the platform for some sort of recovery. Last year the PM’s “no time for a novice” phrase caught the mood of the time and for the final quarter of 2008 Cameron’s Tories were on the back foot. A lot was riding on being able to do the same again –…
Why not spend the money when there aren’t the distortions? One of the things to understand about the conference season is that they take place in a very artificial media environment. There’s a long-standing convention that these annual show-piece events are covered by the broadcasters almost to the exclusion of other political news. That was why Brown’s trip to Iraq in the middle of the 2007 Tory conference went down so badly. It was seen as a deliberate spoiler and…
Telegraph Have the Telegraph editors lost their sense of proportion? If you had been following the PB thread last night and had monitored other political blogs then you’d have thought that the political world as we know it was about to come to an end. I was being texted and called with the news that something “very big was going to break”. The story came out at 10pm and looking at how the paper has treated it you would have…
More detail from Populus adds to the gloom It was almost exactly three years ago, while Tony Blair was still Labour leader, that I did a thread – “Why can’t Gordon do the “sincerity thingâ€? – on Brown’s inability to sound convincing when it is clear that he is telling porkies. I suggested that this was his greatest weakness. That observed that for much of the time, of course, politics is about organised hypocrisy and that “a key quality in…
Times How close will the Megrahi case get to Mr. Brown?? This is the key extract from this morning’s main lead in the Times that follows on from the leaked letter in yesterday’s Sunday Times. “Gordon Brown was dragged into the centre of the row over the early release of the Lockerbie bomber last night after it emerged that a key decision that could have paved the way for the terrorist to serve his sentence in Libya was approved by…
Was Kenny MacAskill the weakest link? The SNP could not be blamed for the celebrations in Tripoli last night when Megrahi arrived back in Libya but those TV pictures have certainly added to the challenge the party faces over its decision. The reaction of William Hills has been to lengthen the odds on the SNP winning the next Scottish Elections from 4/6 to 5/6 where they are now joint favourites with Labour. What the Tripoli TV pictures have underlined is…
Mail online Or should Utley have left it well alone? There’s an interesting attack on David Cameron in the Mail which I’m surprised has not got more attention. For the paper’s sometimes controversial columnist, Tom Utley takes the Tory leader to task over the why he uses his family, including his late son, Ivan, in the NHS argument. Utley’s focus is on those who argue about the NHS by reducing everything to their personal experiences. “..I find it deeply depressing,…