Commons Library Research – 2009 local elections Is it their resource that’s making the difference in the marginals? This is to highlight the excellent piece put up on PB2 a few hours ago by Bunnco – in his series of what might be causing the bigger swings in the marginals. For in his second look at the issue he suggests that the massive decline in Labour councillors in the key seats together with the corresponding increase in Tory ones might…
Could Ken be Labour candidate once again? What are we to make of the stream of little reports that suggest that Ken Livingston might be manoeuvring to be Labour’s candidate for the London mayoralty in 2012? The Standard’s Paul Waugh has blogged about Labour’s decision to appoint one of Ken’s key aides to the big post of running the party’s London campaigns and wondered whether a return might be in the offing. So should you be risking your money on…
What do local by elections tell us? Thursday’s local by-election results were among the worst that I can remember for the Conservatives. The Party lost five out of seven seats it was defending, and saw its vote share fall sharply almost everywhere. By contrast, Labour and the Liberal Democrats performed extremely well, making a net gain of four and two, respectively. Naturally, both parties’ activists have been heartened by this, and Conservatives, judging by the blogs, have been perplexed. Currently,…
Politics.co.uk Would this mean a by-election in South Shields? There’s a story runnnig, which appears to be an exclusive, on the Politics.co.uk website suggesting that David Miliband has accepted” the top EU foreign affairs role that he was being tipped and, indeed, is current favourite in the betting. Well done to Wibbler on the previous thread for the spot. According to the site’s Emmeline Saunders the information has come from “a Labour source” and that this could all be announced…
Will Brown’s ratings go up or down? The Irish bookmaker, PaddyPower is now offering a monthly market on which way Brown’s YouGov approvals ratings are going to move. This is based on the monthly Sunday Times YouGov survey, the next one of which should come this weekend. Previous results can be seen here and looking at what’s happened in the past four months I think that PaddyPower price of 5/4 on it being in the 20-30% range looks great value….
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…
And what about the plan to give them more powers? One announcement at the Tory conference has the side effect of creating more elections which are likely to lead to more betting markets during a period when these will be quite scarce. A big betting occasion will be twelve referenda, all taking place on the same day, in leading English cities on whether to have an elected mayor or not. The idea of a “big bang” like this seems designed…
How’ll the “Man in the White Suit” affect the race? As predicted here a month ago the “Man in the White Suit”, ex BBC-reporter and victor as an independent at Tatton in 1997, Martin Bell has got involved with the next big political betting event in the UK – the mayoral by-election in Bedford on October 15 with an electorate of 100,000. We’ve reported already on the visit of David Cameron and the Tory open primary to select their candidate…