Times Online What chances her survival if the Green case is dropped? At the end of November, less than a day after the police raid on Damian Green’s offices in the Palace of Westminster, I placed as much as William Hill would allow me at 7/4 that Jacqui Smith would move from being home secretary at some time before the general election. In spite of everything that bet is still outstanding. The price later tightened to 6/4 and the time…
David Herdson’s first post as guest editor In another recession, in another country, in another decade, an aide to a presidential candidate once declared that one of the three key themes to their campaign was “the economy, stupidâ€. In fact, it was the key issue; no-one remembers the other two (which is ironic, as one was “don’t forget healthcareâ€). The candidate was of course Bill Clinton and he duly went on to defeat the incumbent president later that year. However,…
Would his appearances highlight the Brown absences? Yet again Gordon Brown had other “pressing business” and managed to avoid his weekly commons scrutiny at PMQs – his place being taken as usual by Harriet Harman. I haven’t added this up by my guess is that the PM so arranges his diary that he is facing far fewer PMQ sessions than any other prime minister in modern times. It’s getting to look like a deliberate strategy to avoid something where he…
How good is a 100/1 long-shot bet? At 10 pm last night, after an evening in which the right-wing blogsphere had been buzzing over a speech directly to Gordon Brown in the European Parliament yesterday by the Tory MEP, Daniel Hannan, our friend Shadsy, the political market maker for Ladbrokes, popped up with a great bet. He had a simple posting here: “If anyone does want to take a flyer on Hannan as next Tory leader, you can have 200/1…
How to improve your odds by combining bets Over the past few days Richard Nabavi has been alerting us to what seems to be a great betting opportunity by combining two bets – the 4/7 that William Hill Politics is offering on the Tories NOT getting 375 seats or more and the same odds that Ladbrokes are offering on the Tories getting an overall majority. This might sound a bit complicated so let’s go through what I’ve done this morning….
Observer Is Boris going to be a thorn in Dave’s side in the years ahead? What might be good economics is not necessarily always good politics, as the Conservative leadership are discovering over the issue of whether or not to implement Labour’s planned 2011 income tax rise of 45p for the top rate. Lord Tebbit, who prefers spending cuts to tax rises, may be a repeat offender on speaking out against party policy in recent years, but then he does…
Voting in the PB March 2009 Prediction closed at 6pm and above are the charts showing the number of seats site users believe each of the parties will get at the election. In retrospect I think that we tried to do too much and perhaps ought to have just left it with the three polls featured above. For it was noticeable how voting dropped off as you went down the page. The first survey on election party leaders attracted nearly…
Ipsos-MORI Is it because Cameron has been out of the news? When the MORI poll came out this morning my initial reaction was that what had driven the decline in the Tory share and increase in the Labour one was a big increase in the number of the latter’s supporters saying they were “100% certain to vote”. We have now just got the detailed data and I was wrong. The level of overall Tory support in the poll was not…