What if Morley & Outwod saw the same swing? The video is the famous one of Michael Portillo’s result at the May 1997 general election. The CON>LAB swing was an amazing 17.1% which was way above the uniform national swing and it was by far the most unexpected result of the night. The victim, of course, was a high profile cabinet minister who was being talked of as post-election party leader. For the thing about the uniform swing is that…
Will his 2009 PB prediction be as good as his 2007 one? In the week of the 2007 Labour conference, on September 28 2007, the Observer columnist and writer, Nick Cohen, made an extraordinary prediction in a comment that he posted here on Politicalbetting when general election speculation was at its height. Nick wrote: “My colleagues think that if Brown backs off after marching his men to the top off the hill the commentariat will turn on him. The press…
Did Gord’s honeymoon end with his visit to Iraq? My third extract to help us understand that defining first week in October 2007 is a Newsnight interview between Jeremy Paxman and Bob Ainsworth which took place in the aftermath of Brown’s trip to Iraq and the statement on British troop reductions but before Brown’s famous interview with Andrew Marr. Paxman’s normal manner is aggressive but the core of his case was that there had been some fiddling of the figures…
Spectator Coffee House Is Gordon reconciled to going down with the ship? The Coffee House blog has picked up a fascinating quote from the FT about a Number 10 source which could change the whole dynamic of the next ten months – Brown thinks he’s going to be defeated. It reports: “One Downing Street insider said the prime minister was more relaxed because he now realised that he was certain to lose the next election and was powerless to defy…
Is this why going negative is more effective? The YouTube from Labour’s unsuccessful 1970 re-election campaign is pretty feeble by modern standards but highlights a challenge faced by all governments when they seek re-election – how to campaign on their record? For in every general election people are looking forward and reeling off numbers about the past often does to resonate. It can sound tedious and boring and in any case who cares? What voters want to know is that…
Millais “Autumn Leaves” (Wikimedia Commons) What will the “season of mists” hold? So what will the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” hold for domestic and international politics – and where might you be investing some of your hard-earned cash on the betting markets? The usual caveats of political prediction apply – and as David Herdson rightly reminds us in this morning’s piece on Iran, it’s Macmillan’s “Events, dear boy, events” which are always liable to blow prognostications off course….
Who is the mystery cabinet minister? The following cryptic paragraph from leftward-leaning blogger, Paul Linford, has intrigued me for the past twenty four hours. Talking of, inevitably, the Labour succession, he writes: “..The plan, or so we are asked to believe, is for a leading Blairite Cabinet minister to stage what is being termed a “nuclear resignation†in the middle of Labour’s conference this autumn which would force Mr Brown out within hours.” Just who of the present cabinet could…
Foreign events have changed things before – could it happen again? In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War, a senior Bush official was reported as saying “Real men don’t go to Baghdad, they go to Tehran.” If the neo-Cons who were pushing that agenda were as influential now as they were then, then the Iranian government’s current actions would be making their trigger fingers decidedly twitchy. Of course, not only are the neo-Cons of the Bush administration not in…