Betfair Politics Candidate Best bookie price Betfair Back – Lay David Miliband 2/5 1.43 – 1.45 Ed Miliband 9/4 3.4 – 3.5 Ed Balls 66/1 110 – 140 Andy Burnham 80/1 70 – 130 Diane Abbott 150/1 220 – 390 If the election is running to plan then the first ballot papers should be going out to qualified voters in the three sections of the electoral college at the end of next week. So far the only firm polling evidence…
YouGov The government’s net approval rating drops to zero The big polling news in the past twenty-fours hours has been the move to a zero rating, for the first time since the election, in the YouGov government approval rating. The question is a straightforward “Do you approve or disapprove of the government’s record to date?” The latest numbers were 40% approve and 40% disapprove. These figures started falling back for the coalition at the time of the budget and have…
Guardian Has Clarke become the Lib Dems’ most popular Tory? On the afternoon of Monday September 20th Nick Clegg will have to make the speech of his life to his party gathering in Liverpool in what looks set to be THE event of the conference season. For the reaction of his audience could determine how long the coalition can survive and with it his own future. The stakes are high and Clegg has to be able to demonstrate that his…
Tom Harris blog Who will win the AV referendum? News broke overnight that Matthew Elliott, founder of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and BigBrotherWatch, will be leading the ‘No 2 AV’ campaign in the forthcoming referendum on electoral reform. Guido has linked to the a betting exchange suggesting a ‘Yes’ win at time of writing. However, if you wander over to Ladbrokes, you’ll find the ‘No’ priced at 2/5 and the ‘Yes’ at 7/4 (again at time of writing). Now it doesn’t take…
Guardian Could Labour be wrong by “playing nasty”? One of most provocative “Monday columns” in the the papers this morning is from Jacky Ashley in the Guardian in which she takes Labour to task for not reading reading the public mood right. She argues: “Labour is playing bad politics. The leadership campaign is turning into a tin-ear, foot-in-mouth competition about who can be nastiest to the Liberal Democrats. As candidates desperately try to prove themselves more true Labour, more tribal…
Ipsos-MORI But does MORI give a bit of a relief to the yellows? In the build up to what one commentator is now calling “Super Thursday” – the elections on May 5th 2011 – we are going to see a fair bit of polling. For on that that day there’ll be elections to the Welsh Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, local councils in many parts of England as well as the planned referendum on the alternative vote. Ipsos-MORI has just published…
British Election Study Would it have taken away the “TINA defence”? Those old to remember the Thatcher years will recall what came to be known as TINA – “There is no alterative” – her refrain when her policies were challenged. Well I wonder whether TINA has returned as the fact of the coalition continues to dominate the political debate. The above projection on what AV would have done to the 2010 election outcome is part a mass of information now…
Has Labour misplayed its defections game? It’s well known that Charles Kennedy was not happy with the Lib Dem-Conservative coalition deal when it was put together and by all accounts, remains so. That’s been reinforced by a spate of newspaper articles today that suggest that he might be, or might have been, considering defecting to Labour. As Nick Palmer notes in this morning’s thread, the mere fact that the story’s come out without a simultaneous defection indicates that it’s not…