Could my December 2008 speculation come about? Back in December 2008 I put forward what I described as a “plan for Clegg” in the event that the Tories ended up with many more votes at the general election but behind Labour on seats. Such an outcome is highly possible if the gap between the parties gets down to five or six percent. On the one hand Clegg would find it hard with his own MPs and activists to deal with…
Is it smart to deny the blindingly obvious? The interviewing trait where Mr.Brown is at his most vulnerable is when he seeks to deny something that is clearly the case. Less charitable people than me might use the word “porkie”. The problem is that he does this when it is so obvious Thus when it was apparent almost to the entire country in October 2007 that a factor in deferring the planned early election was the sudden change in Labour’s…
How did we rate Brown’s Marr performance? So there we have it – Gordon Brown’s big interview on the Marr programme on BBC1 and what looks like the first round of the campaign. I think a lot of work has gone on to to get him to this stage. He was much more fluid than usual and had some well-thought out sound-bites and arguments. He looked and sounded fairly confident. Where he was at his weakest was when Marr challenged…
Telegraph Will it be PMMP after the election? Several papers, the Telegraph amongst them, carry reports of Mandy’s magazine interview in which he hints of his desire to return to the Commons as an MP. PaddyPower and Ladbrokes both make him fifth favourite to succeed Brown at 9/1 and 8/1 respectively. Yet for that to happen he needs to ditch his life peerage and that requires a current law change move to get through parliament quickly enough so he can…
Following a crash of our database server last night, I have migrated the database to Amazon’s new Relational Database Service. Hopefully, this will lead to better scalability and reliability. Some people (Seth O Logue and Old Nat…) lost comments in the migration, and I’m sorry about that. It is possible we will see some performance issues over the next couple of days as I tweak the configuration, but hopefully these will be short-lived. Right: off to bed now. Robert
Is the 14/1 that it’ll be June a value bet? So far most people seem to have dismissed the prospect of Brown hanging on until a June election (the last possible date) – mainly on the grounds that he would not want the big one to take place after Labour’s expected pasting in the May 6th locals. But how valid a reason is this? And doesn’t everything we know about him suggest that he’s going to find this such an…
A re-run of Andy Cooke’s December 2007 guest slot (This analysis first appeared on PB in December 2007 and has been much quoted both here and in the mainstream media since. It’s even more timely today and I thought it was worth re-running – MS) One of the most widely held items of received wisdom is “The opinion polls always swing back towards the Government as the Election approaches”. That mid-term blues will always overemphasise an Opposition’s performance in the…
guardian.co.uk Could Labour’s paymasters wield the knife? This is the conclusion of Polly Toynbee’s first Guardian column of 2010. “…Until now the unions have been Brown’s praetorians, whipped in by Charlie Whelan. But it’s time union leaders asked themselves if it’s in their members’ interests to see Labour crash out under Brown. The cabinet is frozen by individual self-interest – shame on all of them. They want Brown gone, but none dares wield the knife without the others. Future contenders…