Are the Tories being out-classed in the spin wars? One of big decisions that Gord took during his summer holiday was to beef up Labour and the government’s whole PR operation in order to compete with the Tory threat. Result: the return of perhaps the most successful political spin team ever – Mandelson and Campbell. And over the past six weeks we have seen a transformation in the way Team Brown is getting its message across and its ability to…
click on picture to watch How would Blair have dealt with this? For Gordon Brown today’s PMQs should have been a breeze. The Governor of the Bank of England was broadly endorsing his tax cuts plan which should have provided the ammunition to embarrass Cameron. Instead we got a stinging exchange over the Haringey baby tragedy with, at one point, Brown accusing Cameron of “playing party politics” over the issue – a mistake. What struck me was how poor Brown…
When are they going to clamp-down on pro-Labour samples? One most Fridays when parliament is sitting BBC2’s “Daily Politics” programme announces the results of its latest ComRes poll on matters of current concern. This generally gets picked up by other parts of the media who treat it, quite naturally, like any other ComRes political poll. It’s not and the BBC should say so. For the Daily Politics polls have one fundamental difference compared with the standard ComRes voting intention surveys…
From a fundraising perspective this story does not add up For twenty years before switching to work full-time on PB my day job was as professional fundraiser running the operations at Oxford, Cambridge, LSE and York universities as well, in an earlier guise advising on a professional basis organisations such as the Liberal Democrats. And from where I sit the Osborne story as it is being related at the moment simply does not add up. The fundamental flaw is the…
Is the new Cabinet “a supergroup or a sad tribute act”? Peter Mandelson’s return to Cabinet for a third time has given the Sunday papers plenty to consider. The man himself gives an interview to the Observer in which he states that he is “joined at the hip to the PM”, who will lead the party into the next election. The paper says that Miliband’s leadership ambitions are now dead in the water as the Blairites rally round during the…
Can we really envisage him being at Number 10? One thing that we are learning from the McCain-Obama battle in the US is that instant reactions by the media and professional commentators are not always the best guide to the public’s mood. Thus a week ago the first debate was scored by most of the experts as being a McCain win or a tie – yet the polling this week has been all towards the Democratic contender. So I’m holding…
Sunday Telegraph Has ICM been been dumped for an unregistered firm? There’s a lot going on at the moment and the apparent decision of a major Sunday newspaper to switch pollsters might not seem that important – but today’s BPIX poll in the Sunday Telegraph raises serious issues for all who care about polling transparency. For after using the respected ICM firm for years the Sunday Telegraph’s poll this morning is from a firm that is not part of the…
Why are they always the first to respond? The “quickie” YouGov poll for this morning’s Sun has raised an interesting question from the previous thread from Nick Palmer MP. He wonders “whether YouGov is confident that the subgroup of their panel who reply to surveys within 24 hours are representative? No idea what sort of bias it might introduce, but worth a thought.” I agree and maybe someone from the firm might respond. What I do know is that the…