Might its days of ‘backing the winner’ be over? One consequence of the phone hacking scandal is that there’s almost no chance of The Sun backing Labour in 2015. Ed Miliband has gone out of his way to pick a fight with the Murdochs and it’s doubtful whether he’d want the endorsement even if it were on the cards, which it surely isn’t. So if it’s The Sun wot wins it then it will back the Tories then? Well yes,…
The Sunday Times are reporting that Andrew Cooper, formerly of Populus and currently David Cameron’s pollster has warned the Tories they face embarrassment in the 2014 European Parliament elections, where they could be pushed into second place or worse by UKIP, unless they make a dramatic manifesto pledge to have an in/out referendum. A source said: “Cooper’s polling is clear. There’s a real public backlash against the EU and if we don’t do something, UKIP will get the benefit. There’s a…
In the Spectator today, Nigel Farage raises the possibility of joint Conservative/UKIP candidates at the next election. He says “What I do know is there are Conservative associations up and down the country who think this could be a way forward. “All I would say to you is that in terms of co-operation or deals or anything in the future, firstly it’s some way off. But secondly, I can see that there are associations thinking along these lines. If…
Are the blues right to think that the purples will return? The two big moves in opinion since the general election have been the Lib Dem collapse with the switch to Labour and now the rise of UKIP. The former has been studied at length but there’s been very little polling data on the latter. One challenge is that of all the pollsters only ComRes provides cross-tabs on UKIP supporters. In its latest poll Comres also has the question “Which,…
Is 6/4 a good value bet? Ladbrokes has a bet at 6/4 that an MP will defect to UKIP before the general election. It looks like a reasonable punt. The problem for potential MP defectors is that UKIP has never even come within a whisker of winning a Westminster seat and the chances of holding on at a general election must be low. So a potential defector would have to factor in losing both their job and parliamentary salary. As…
ConservativeHome poll September 2009 Why’s Farage’s party so poor at the ground war? This post has been going round my head since Thursday night’s PB party following a couple of conversations with those who were there. The first was an observation from John O, a regular since the early days of the site, about how few PBers appeared to have little direct experience of the grunt work and expertise required to win elections on the ground. The second was with…
David Herdson asks: Is now their best chance to breakthrough? The nature of George Galloway’s victory in Bradford West might have been a one-off but the anti-politics mood it fed off is present far more widely. Mike has recently made timely observations that the combined net approval scores for the three leaders with YouGov is at what is probably a record low of -121%, and that despite a rapid drop in government economic trust figures, Labour has barely benefited except…
Surely this should be the moment for a party of the right? You probable haven’t noticed it but the party that came second in terms of votes in the last national election but one, UKIP, is starting its annual conference in Eastbourne today. That election, for the EU parliament in June 2009 was something of a high point and since then they’ve really struggled. Their hopes of a Westminster seat at the general election were dashed when Nigel Farage came…