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…
Telegraph Have the Telegraph editors lost their sense of proportion? If you had been following the PB thread last night and had monitored other political blogs then you’d have thought that the political world as we know it was about to come to an end. I was being texted and called with the news that something “very big was going to break”. The story came out at 10pm and looking at how the paper has treated it you would have…
The Times is running a story on Tory PPCs who are apparently involved in lobbying efforts ahead of the next election. The Telegraph is reporting that Speaker Jon Bercow has made comments about the accountability of Lord Mandelson to MPs Max Clifford is now representing Baroness Scotland’s former housekeeper, causing that story to run on another couple of days at least. Oh, and on the last thread David Roe brings us this exclusive from his new home at the Scottish…
Should Clegg’s troops should have more distinctiveness? The old Liberal Party nearly went out of existence in the 1950s but in the years that followed staged a recovery based round a distinctive localism, a sense of being outside the establishment and the caricature of a politician and of them being the ‘nice’ party. If you have no chance of power nationally, you have to offer the electorate something else. A ‘more pleasant and more local’ way of doing politics was…
PoliticsHome The updated mega poll is due within a fortnight I’ve just had word that the fieldwork for the 2009 Politics Home mega marginals poll has been completed and we should get it in early October. It is on the same scale as the 2008 September version which covered more than 34,000 separate online interviews in a total of 238 parliamentary constituencies where the big battles at the next election are going to be fought. The sample was seventeen times…
Can Pickles entice Lib Dems into voting Tory? This week I’ve been on holiday in Hadrian’s Wall country in Northumberland away from a fast internet connection so I have been unable to catch up on what seems to have been the political broadcasting highlight – the encounter on the Today programme between Tory Chairman, Eric Pickles, and the prominent Lib Dem, Chris Huhne. See this from Harry Phibbs in the Guardian for the details and a description of Chris Huhne’s…
Marf is PB’s regular cartoonist – more of her work can be found at LondonSketchBook.com
Is there a case for a Lib Dem sell? The Sporting Index Spread Market on the number of commons seats the parties will win at the general election has seen little movement in recent weeks – but could all that change after the conferences? Whether Nick Clegg manages to put things on a firmer footing in his speech this afternoon remains to be seen but given that this is the last big showcase before the general election the best that…