What’ll they do now the EU issue has been neutralised? I wonder whether when the experts analyse the 2010 election that the events of this week will be seen as the point when Labour finally ran out of steam. For in spite of all the challenges Brown’s party faced they could still hope that the Tory wounds over Europe would open up again when the Lisbon treaty was finally ratified. They’d seen at first hand how the Tory split had…
Ipsos-MORI October 2009 Issues table Is the evidence that voters don’t give a monkey’s I’ve raised this before and will raise it again – the EU and other issues relating to Europe are not things that get voters wound up. The polling suggests that this is very low down on the list of concerns. Above is the MORI issues index for October – a month that saw several days of the Lisbon treaty being the main political news when the…
Could the “Turnip Taliban” undermine his leadership? There’s now a betting market on the situation in the safe Tory seat of South West Norfolk where the move to de-select the PPC, 34 year old Elizabeth Truss, is opening up all sorts of issues over the powers of local parties and charges of sexism. Last week the local executive decided by 19 votes to 14 to put Ms Truss’s candidature back to a special general meeting in a fortnight’s time because…
Telegraph Is the sky the limit for the Penrith PPC? There’s a lot been written in recent days about Rory Stewart who has just been selected as Tory PPC for the safe seat of Penrith. By any standard he’s got an extraordinary CV and even went to Eton followed by Oxford which seems to be the standard background for so many. But just read this from Anna van Praagh’s Sunday Telegraph profile: “Britain doesn’t make men like Rory Stewart any…
Could this solve Cameron’s Lisbon ratification difficulties? Tim Montgomerie at ConservativeHome has an important post tonight setting out what he believes will be Cameron’s new approach to the EU issue following the likely ratification within the next few days of the Lisbon Treaty. In broad terms the plan is to substitute the holding of a referendum (which always looked difficult once ratification happened) with putting the fight for repatriation of key EU powers in the Tory general election manifesto –…
ICM Nov 1-2 1996 How Gord would kill for 34% shares today! One of the challenges with trying to work out whether a Tory victory is a foregone conclusion is that the only modern parallel is Labour’s run up to the Tony Blair landslide in May 1997 – something that’s made much harder by big changes in polling practice and the fact that the only firm doing it now almost exactly as it was doing it then is ICM. Featured…
 David Herdson assesses some of the options? Nearly eight years after the Laeken Summit kickstarted the process, there’s a good chance that the final hurdles to ratification of the Lisbon Treaty could be overcome next week, leading to the treaty coming into force on December 1. In Britain, that will throw the spotlight onto the Tories, whose policy on Lisbon will expire with the completion of the ratification process. The current policy of a referendum is one which is…
Could he open up some of the old wounds? I wonder whether all the focus on the prospect of “President Blair” and the continued attacks by Labour on the Tory EU partners is actually overshadowing what could be the biggest UK-EU political development of them all – the rhetoric which is coming from David Cameron? This was looked at by the BBC’s Nick Robinson who today has also written a piece about it. Robinson writes: “..The new Conservative approach to…