How different it all seems one year on Today’s my 65th birthday and, as no doubt it will be hard to avoid today, the first anniversary of that Tuesday in May 2010 when Gordon Brown, Sarah and his two children left Number 10 for the last time as PM. I’m celebrating (my birthday that is) with a cup of Darjeeling First Flush 2011 Orange Valley which for any PB tea buffs is absolutely sensational and well worth the £15.95 for…
Why didn’t his party pick up any more councillors? There’ve been calls during the day for Nigel Farage to step down as UKIP leader following his party’s dismal performance last Thursday. After the strong showing in the Barnsley by-election and putting up nearly thirteen hundred candidates in last week’s local elections the party saw no return for all its efforts. The key UKIP figure, former EU Chief Accountant Marta Andreasen, has said that it’s time for the leader, who was…
Will he become a minister again? According to the London Evening Standard, David Laws, the Lib Dem Chief Secretary of the treasury who stood down last May after allegations about his parliamentary expenses, broke six sets of rules according to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner who has just completed an investigation into the affair. The question is whether the report is so critical that no immediate return to a ministerial career is possible. We’ll have to wait to see the detail…
It’s CON 37: LAB 39: LD 11 There’s a new Populus phone poll in the Times which sees the Tories edging up a point with Labour dropping one and the Lib Dems unchanged. This means that all the phone polls this month have Labour in the 30s. This is in sharp contrast to the online firms which have Ed Miliband’s party a few notches higher. YouGov, for instance, has had the main opposition party in the 40s throughout 2011. With…
It’s now three days since the result of the AV referendum was announced and I am still waiting for someone to claim the prize of £1000 worth of free bets from William Hill. One of the conditions of the competition was that those who thought they had won should claim to be by email. The thread is here. Unless this is claimed by 2200 on Tuesday night the prize will lapse and we’ll use it in another competition. Mike Smithson
What lead does he need to be confident of a majority? The above chart shows the Commons seats projections from Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus and Anthony Wells’s UKPR when the Rallings and Thrasher National Equivalent Vote shares from last Thursday’s local elections are fed in. As can be seen from the chart the Tories would drop 20-26 seats and Ed Miliband’s Labour would be 10-15 seats short of a majority even though, on these projections , it has a smaller…
Does 22.6% of the vote give a mandate? The above is a Tweet from Philip Davies – MP for Shipley where, I believe, PB guest editor, David Herdson is/was chairman of the local Conservative Association. The Davies point is a fair one but is he consistent? What was his reaction when his Dad, Peter Davies won the 2009 executive mayor race in Doncaster after coming out second in first round votes on just 22.6%. Doncaster Mayoral Election 2009 Name 1st…
Before we finally move on from the pollsters’ performances in their final surveys ahead of last Thursday’s election we still have to cover Scotland. The chart for the Holyrood constituency section is above. Alas ICM, the top pollster from the Scottish Elections in 2007 and the firm that got the AV referendum correct to within a remarkable 0.1%, did not carry out a Holyrood survey after March 15th and is not included. It should be noted that the Ipsos-MORI survey,…