Could he be storing up trouble for the future? The 2006 picture of David Cameron with the huskies in the Arctic became one of the defining images of the first few months of his leadership as he sought to create a new narrative for the party. Here was a Conservative leader embracing one of the key issues of the day and what better way of making this into a news story than the trip to Norway. But is his view…
Will Hague’s opposition thwart Tone’s EU hopes? With just one country left to ratify the Lisbon treaty we are getting closer to the moment when the EU will be appointing the first President of the EU council who is likely to become referred to as the President of Europe. The big question, and there’ quite a bit of betting on this, is who is going to get it? Can Tony Blair, Labour’s star three-times election winner who was ousted to…
Or is Brown’s party just clutching at straws? According to Gaby Hinsliff and Henry McDonald in the Observer this morning ” a private analysis by Labour strategists suggests that the blues could be denied up to 50 seats at the election because of UKIP supporters splitting the Tory vote. The figures in Labour’s study, if that’s not too grand a term, “..are based on 100 “supermarginal” seats where its MPs are holding on with majorities of less than 2,000.” Certainly…
ConservativeHome ..Or are site readers just echoing back Tim’s views? One of the big political stories of the week which could have an electoral impact was David Cameron’s comments about all women short-lists. The reaction on a number of Tory-blogs, particularly from Tim Montgomerie’s ConservativeHome has been electric. There’s been post afer post about the subject and with many commenters being hostile as well. Yesterday we had one of ConHome’s “polls” with the summary results appearing above. This has been…
1929 Conservative poster – Wikimedia Commons Could this still have potency – 80 years on? While idly surfing the net over the weekend I came across this wonderful poster from the 1929 general election which seemed to resonate with the current political mood. For Labour seems most vulnerable when the Daily Mail, and it is usually the Daily Mail, finds some new law or regulation that could have consequences way beyond the wrong that it was trying to deal with….
Are the big moves in target-rich regions? Whenever the full dataset from a new poll comes out there’s usually a discussion on the site of the regional breakdowns. The problem, of course, is that each sub-set is not subject to the overall weighting calculations and sample sizes are small. In the chart above we see something different – the aggregated MORI polling data for the first nine months of 2009 compared with what happened at the general election in May…
SkyNews Could this affair explode again? It’s been a bit of an up and downer for former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, this morning. With minutes of the report on last December’s arrest of Damien Green there’s news that no further action will be taken against her on her expenses. The investigation into the Green arrest has concluded that the documents that were being handed over to Green “did not contain information which threatened to undermine national security or Government effectiveness”…
Bedfordshire on Sunday Are punters reading this one right? With the Tories keen to keep up the Manchester momentum David Cameron is heading back to Bedford tomorrow where what will almost certainly be the biggest electoral test anywhere before the general election takes place on Thursday. At the stake is a by-election for one of the “US-style” mayor posts. There’s an electorate of 117,000 and there’s been a whole stream of leading politicians heading there in the past week. The…