Is this worth a punt? Ladbrokes has put a couple of interesting referendum markets up this morning one of which offers some value. This is the 10/1 shot that there will be a referendum on the Lisbon treat during 2010. The price looks quite tempting. Clearly it requires the Tories to win the election and then to go forward with a referendum plan that happens before the end of next year. As of now the party is only committed to…
Could the Bullingdon attacks still have potency? In her first Conservative Conference week drawing PB’s cartoonist, Marf, touches on an area of potential vulnerability that Andrew Marr sought to bring up in his BBC1 interview with David Cameron yesterday – the perception that the leadership are “toffs” who who don’t really understand so called “ordinary people”. From some of the rhetoric in Brighton last week we can deduce that Labour is toying with how best to use this aspect of…
Is Blair’s being “all things to all people” the right approach? So we are nearly there – the final party conference before the general election – and all the pressure is on Cameron and his Tory team to spell out what a Conservative government would do. But is setting out in detail the party’s plans the wrong approach for it just provides ammunition for his opponents to pick at and then throw back at him? Thus far being evasive has…
CON 40% (+3) LAB 26% (-4) LD 20%(-1) Labour’s YouGov tracker deficit doubles After the euphoria amongst Labour supporters last night and some corresponding gloom from Tories today’s YouGov daily tracker moves the party shares back to the sort of territory that we’ve come to expect in recent months – Labour in the mid-20s and the Tories in the low 40s. Most of the online questionnaires would have been filled in last night after a day that was dominated by…
Daily Express How would a referendum U-turn go down in Manchester? Tomorrow the Irish vote in their second referendum on the EU Lisbon treaty with the results being known the following day – just as delegates to the Conservative conference begin arriving in Manchester. The story featured above from the Daily Express gives a sense of the minefield Cameron might have to negotiate should, as expected the Irish vote YES. With the Czech government said to be on the point…
Will the Sun’s move dispirit the party even more? Labour’s big remaining hope as it entered the conference season was that Brown’s speech would exceed the low expectations and provide the platform for some sort of recovery. Last year the PM’s “no time for a novice” phrase caught the mood of the time and for the final quarter of 2008 Cameron’s Tories were on the back foot. A lot was riding on being able to do the same again –…
Will this be Osborne’s eye-catching announcement? A couple of weeks ago at an impromptu question and answer session in Bedford the Tory Chairman, Eric Pickles, let slip that there’d be a big announcement at their conference about pensions. Since then I’ve been pondering over what this could be and the thought struck me that this will be Osborne’s 2009 big announcement. For we have sort of got used to his Monday conference sessions and no doubt we all recall his…
Will this make life easier for Gordon or not? There’s news this morning of a big polling development, the first product of which is seen in the panel above – the YouGov/Sky News daily tracker for the party conference season. This shows day by day how opinion changed during the last week and how the “conference effect” seems to decline as the news agenda moves on. This is unlike normal tracker polls which have generally involved only 250 fresh interviews…