The last time a party elected a leader in the face of the polls In August 2001 ICM carried out a poll to test the reactions of ordinary voters to the two remaining candidates in that year’s Tory leadership contest – Iain Duncan Smith and Ken Clarke. It will be recalled that these two had got to the final short-list after Michael Portillo had been squeezed out in the Tory MP part of the selection process. When asked to compare…
How damaging is the EPP climb-down to Cameron? With the reverberations from the Lord Levy continuing to dominate the headlines the Indpendent is reporting that the Conservatives will today announce that David Cameron’s plan to leave the EPP Group in the European Parliament is being “shelved until 2009”. So while the NuLab spin machine is frantically trying to recover from Levy the Tories will be dealing with their own bad news which had to come out sometime. They’ll be hoping…
Earlier in the week, Rupert Murdoch gave an interview to one of his own papers in Australia. Asked if there was a chance he would support the Conservatives in the next general election, he answered with a Majoresque “Oh yes”. The role of Murdoch’s papers in swinging British elections, particularly the Sun, has passed into political folklore. “It Was The Sun Wot Won It”, the paper itself proclaimed after Major’s victory in 1992. More recently, and particularly since Murdoch’s mid-1990s…
Has the “Tory leader in steep decline” claim got any foundation? In a feature on David Cameron and Tories in the Observer Andrew Rawnsley made this assertion – the peg for most of the article:- “To the concern of his circle, there are already signs that his novelty is wearing thin. His personal approval ratings are in steep decline.” This has sparked off much discussion on the site and in a number of Lib Dem blogs particularly those that backed…
Why Cameron can afford to ignore Manchester, Liverpool etc? The above coats of arms are from Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield – all great commercial centres, the homes of major universities and with proud industrial heritages. One or two of them, I’m told, have, or have had, modestly good soccer teams. Yet none of them has a Tory MP and some commentators are saying that the party can never return to power unless this can be reversed. Indeed –…
Ben’s journey from Labour to the Tories Long-standing PB.C regulars who followed the end of the Donald Rumsfeld thread on Sunday evening will have been shocked to read the exchanges about Ben’s move from Labour to the Tories. For Ben was one of the earliest, and at times most prolific, contributors to the site. For a long period ahead of the May 2005 General Election his regular and lucid postings added to many people’s understanding of how the contest was…
Is Francis Maude right – the problem’s the party not the leader? One of the most quoted pieces of research from the 2005 General Election was that the public public view of a particular policy dropped considerably when those interviewed were told that this is what the Tories wanted. In an echo of that this morning in Guardian the Tory Chairman, Francis Maude says that the public are still unpersuaded by his party but asserts they they have taken to…
Whose career prospects will look better tonight? This afternoon’s budget looks set to become the first one for many decades when there’ll be almost as much interest in the response of the Leader of the Opposition as in the contents of the Chancellor’s statement itself. For this will be the first time that David Cameron has faced Gordon Brown across the floor of the House in what is likely to be a foretaste of things to come. How will Brown’s…