She’s doing better than IDS in 2003 Yesterday was the 14th anniversary of what I considered to be one of the best political betting days ever where the best place to find out what was happening was to look at the prices on the Betfair Exchange. After taking over from William Hague two days after 9/11 Iain Duncan Smith struggled for more than 2 years to maintain the confidence of his party and that all finally snapped at the end…
Announcing her departure at the Tory conference in October 2018 looks value at 12/1 I like this market from Paddy Power, a lot of the markets on Theresa May’s departure are when she formally stops being Prime Minister, this market is when she announces her intention to stand down (or loses a vote of confidence of the parliamentary party), not when she actually goes. For example if this market had existed for David Cameron, it would have paid out on…
So much for the campaign basing it all on her A unique feature of the Conservative campaign for the June election was that the branding was completely about Theresa May and you would have been hard pressed on things like the Tory battle bus to see the word Conservative. Clearly this was based on the belief believe that the Prime Minister herself was the strongest feature of the Conservatives offer in the election that she had called to endorse her…
Two days ago in my post on why there would not be a general election until 2022 I observed that there have been very few by elections in CON held seats in recent times. Tory MPs have been a lot healthier than LAB ones. What CON by-elections defences there have been have been caused by other factors such as the weird resignation by the then shadow Home Secretary David Davis in 2008 so he could fight his own seat for…
It shouldn’t be able to go on like this but it probably will The cartoon just about sums it up. Time is running out under the Brexit extraction process and it is hard to say with any certainty who will be the senior members of government at Christmas. TMay is now a diminished figure and in spite of the apparent turmoil within her party she simply does not have the authority to try to reshuffle her cabinet. One side of…
Peston: “No longer absurd that Boris could be PM within weeks” The former Mayor and current foreign secretary is now clear favourite to be the next CON leader but his odds are nothing like as strong as they were in the weekend after the general election. One of the drivers of the increased sentiment in Boris has come from a Facebook post by ITV’s Robert Peston. This is what he wrote about the Brexit divisions in the cabinet. “..Her (TMay’s)…
Good questioning of TMay by @IainDale getting TMay to refuse 3 times to say she'd vote for Brexit.https://t.co/5DH4ZqO2lb — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) October 10, 2017 If you have not had chance to watch Iain Dale’s interview tonight then it is worth looking at. The beleaguered PM doesn’t do many interviews as long as this one and Iain, a former CON PPC, did not give the PM a easy time. The news part of the session which will be remembered was…
Although the media has moved on she isn’t out of the woods yet No doubt the Number 10 PR team is absolutely delighted that the media has moved on from speculating about TMay’s future as PM but it was a story that dominated the news for five full days. She’s still there and showing resilience. But having been party chair at the time of the last move by CON MPs to oust a leader she’ll be acutely aware of the…