Have we been overlooking a political heavyweight? One of my very favourite political TV dramas was the splendid ‘House of Cards’ trilogy starring Ian Richardson as the deliciously malevolent Francis Urquhart PM. I bought the DVD boxset a couple of years ago, but was heartened to see that it was being repeated on cable channels in the last couple of weeks. The first installment (‘House of Cards’) is my favourite, and the finale (‘The Final Cut’) is wonderfully tragic, but…
UKPolling Report Should the LDs back the seat winners or the vote winners? The above vote shares are within the margins of error of current polling and represent what would appear to be most most unfair outcome possible to the general election – Labour getting less than a third of the vote yet just having more seats in spite of being nearly six points behind. The line that has come out of the Lib Dems is that they “wouldn’t oppose”…
Would PM Straw/Johnson/Denham save more marginal seats? Just watching Gordon Brown on SkyNews this morning I was struck by the way he sometimes deals with difficult questions by seeking to deny the main premise. Thus he was pressed on Mervyn King’s comments earlier in the week and, to the great frustration of the interviewer, he seemed to be stating that the governor of the Bank of England did not say what we all heard him saying before the commons committee…
guardian.co.uk What if the gathering doesn’t meet expectations? There’s an interesting observation by Steve Richard in the Indy this morning comparing next week’s G20 to “the excitement about the early election in the autumn of 2007” which, of course, Brown was widely seen to have bottled out of and was what prompted his first opinion poll collapse. Richards recalls that only a fortnight ago Brown was talking about “a grand bargain, a global deal” at next week’s gathering – “Now…
CON 41(nc) LAB 31(nc) LD 17(nc) The March YouGov survey for the Daily Telegraph is just out and the numbers are exactly the same as those in the Sunday Times survey from the pollster a week and a half ago. There’s not really much to say about it. The key differences between the firm and the other pollsters is that all its surveys are restricted to members of its polling panel – and “certainty to vote” is never used as…
Your chance to nominate the best contributions As many regulars will know the number of posts on PB since we started in 2004 is just about to hit the million mark. We are currently just over 18,000 short of the magic number which should be reached in the next two to three weeks. So of all the the comments that you have seen are there any that really stand out? Are there any that could be worthy of the title…
Has he been defeated by the markets and the Bank? After Tuesday’s forthright comments on Number 10’s economic strategy by the governor of the Bank of England and the failure of yesterday’s UK auction it was always going to be difficult for Brown to continue with his plan for a further economic stimulus. So the comments in New York highlighted by the Guardian perhaps come as no surprise. But how damaging is the apparent change of direction to him personally…
Would his appearances highlight the Brown absences? Yet again Gordon Brown had other “pressing business” and managed to avoid his weekly commons scrutiny at PMQs – his place being taken as usual by Harriet Harman. I haven’t added this up by my guess is that the PM so arranges his diary that he is facing far fewer PMQ sessions than any other prime minister in modern times. It’s getting to look like a deliberate strategy to avoid something where he…