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Category: Tories

If something happened to Dave who’d get his job?

If something happened to Dave who’d get his job?

Would the Cameron project flounder without Cameron? In recent weeks we have had threads about the successors to both Brown and Campbell but so far we’ve not ventured into post-Cameron Tory territory – who would be leader if, for whatever reason, the party had to find a replacement? In many ways this seems a more remote possibility – Cameron’s made progress for his party in the polls and at forty is considerably younger than either Campbell or Brown. Also there’s…

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Is a Tory “love-bomber” coming to a Lib Dem near you?

Is a Tory “love-bomber” coming to a Lib Dem near you?

What do we think of Cameron-Osborne’s latest wheeze? Perhaps the most interesting political piece in an otherwise boring lot of Sunday papers is an article by Melissa Kite in the Sunday Telegraph in which she quotes from a secret campaign report prepared for the Tory leadership on the May 3rd outcome. The document concludes “…. that a strategy of not campaigning negatively against the Liberal Democrats, but rather appearing to agree with them on key issues, has been vindicated. The…

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Has Cameron been following a “Yes Minister” strategy?

Has Cameron been following a “Yes Minister” strategy?

Was the schools row created to keep Gordon off the front pages? Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this week’s news – Gordon’s first as leader-elect – has been how little coverage there’s been of him and the Labour deputy leadership contest. For the big political story has been about Tory policy on grammar schools and the battles that Cameron has been having with his old guard. Hasn’t the timing of this been a bit too convenient? Could all this…

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Should we believe CONhome’s home-made polls?

Should we believe CONhome’s home-made polls?

When is the media going to challenge Montgomerie about his statistics? As far as I can see the otherewse excellent CONhome website is not a member of the British Polling Council – the body that operates the code or practice that all the serious pollsters belong. The body imposes a transparency regime which means that anybody who is interested can work out exactly how the numbers that are produced have been worked out. This was introduced three years ago and…

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How dangerous a moment is this for Cameron?

How dangerous a moment is this for Cameron?

Is now the time for a trading bet on Labour? Could the opportunistic call on Andrew Marr’s programme by UKIP’S leader, Nigel Farage, for Tory MPs to defect over the grammar school issue be a foretaste of how things might get very tricky for the Tory leadership in the next few months. Of course there are not going to be any defections to UKIP but the Farage interview does underline the challenges that the leadership faces. Until now the conventional…

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The betting story of Blackpool 2005

The betting story of Blackpool 2005

How the betting records show that Hitchens was wrong What happened at the Tory conference at Blackpool in October 2005 has become one of those pivotal moments in UK politics and, as we saw, in the programme on Cameron on Channel 4 by Peter Hitchens, a number of myths have developed which don’t fit with the facts. For the above chart shows the implied probabilities based on bets betting odds of the four leading candidates from the start of the…

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Was Cameron’s air tax plan a mistake?

Was Cameron’s air tax plan a mistake?

Are there votes in putting up the cost of flying? Judging by the responses this morning from the Murdoch papers, the Daily Telegraph and CONtinuityIDS the Tories have made a big strategic mistake by going so heavily on green issues in general and the air travel tax in particular. It is not often that a Tory leader launching a new policy initiative comes under so much flak from the Times and the Telegraph – two papers that in former years…

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