The Chancellor is 13/8 favourite to be Next Conservative Leader. He is 15/8 favourite to be Next Prime Minister. And on Betfair, you can get nearly 2/1 and 5/2 about the two propositions. But the folk wisdom on backing the next Tory leader is that the favourite never wins. That the winner is more about who he isn’t, than who he is. You have to go all the way back to Eden to find a clear case of the long-term…
After a turbulent year the Prime Minister enters 2016 stronger than ever writes Keiran Pedley. But will it last? In many respects 2015 was a year of contradictions. On the one hand, it was the year of the political insurgent. UKIP won the best part of 4 million votes at the General Election (though failed to make the breakthrough in seats it had hoped for), the SNP won 56 of 59 seats at Westminster and Jeremy Corbyn swept away the…
National Security is going to feature heavily in 2020 and that’s not good news for Corbyn nor Labour but it might be good news for Michael Fallon The attack in the video above on Ed Miliband during the general election campaign was absolutely brutal and deeply personal but the most important thing for both the Tories and Labour, it was an utterly devastating for Ed Miliband and Labour. With 71% of voters not trusting Corbyn to safeguard Britain’s national security you can…
What’s the post EURef blue team going to be like? The Tories have a long history of tearing themselves apart over Europe. Who can forget how in the weeks after John Major’s sensational election victory in 1992 huge fault lines started to develop in the party. It wasn’t helped by “black Wednesday” – that extraordinary day when Britain could not sustain the value of sterling on the foreign exchanges markets and the country had to leave the ERM. How lucky…
@MSmithsonPB If 38% of Con voters can't answer a question like that in Osborne's favour he's fucked. — ForgottenGenius (@ExStrategist) December 21, 2015 The problem Osborne’s got is the party’s electoral system that was devised by William Hague during his 1997-2001 period as leader. Basically there is an exhaustive ballot of MPs to choose two of their number whose names will go forward to the membership in a secret postal ballot. Given that so many of the blue team at…
BBC News Could this take the media pressure off Mr. Corbyn? Until now the ongoing Tory bullying scandal has been largely over-shadowed by the events within LAB. This could possibly change following this afternoon’s resignation from his post as a minister of the party chairman at the General Election last May, Grant Shapps. All this follows the apparent suicide two months of 21 year old CON activist, Elliott Johnson, whose body was found by the East Coast main line at…
Ten days before he became Tory leader, only 5% of voters preferred John Major as Tory leader. Via @majorsrise pic.twitter.com/fEmGNRQmtC — TSE (@TSEofPB) November 22, 2015 Often winning the Tory leadership is about who you aren’t not about who you are. Twenty-five years ago today Lady Thatcher announced her decision to resign as Prime Minister, but if the parliamentary Tory party had followed the polling then her successor would not have been John Major but Michael Heseltine. The above…
@LordAshcroft Given the 36.9% national CON vote share at GE2015 that seems quite reasonable. — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) November 1, 2015 National vote shares at GE2005 & GE2015 levels do matter Yesterday afternoon the Cameron biographer, pollster and former Tory treasurer, Lord Ashcroft, made the above perceptive Tweet about the limitations of the current government’s power. While in the 2010-2015 parliament this had been because of the Lib Dem coalition the reality now is that the Cameron government’s main limitation…