Will the economy save Labour?

Will the economy save Labour?

David Herdson’s first post as guest editor In another recession, in another country, in another decade, an aide to a presidential candidate once declared that one of the three key themes to their campaign was “the economy, stupid”. In fact, it was the key issue; no-one remembers the other two (which is ironic, as one was “don’t forget healthcare”). The candidate was of course Bill Clinton and he duly went on to defeat the incumbent president later that year. However,…

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Tories move to 44% with ICM

Tories move to 44% with ICM

CON 44(+2) LAB 31(+1) LD 18(-2) Sunday Telegraph poll gives Cameron a boost A new poll by ICM for tomorrow’s Sunday Telegraph is just out and sees Cameron’s party edging up further from the last survey from the firm in the Guardian a week and a half ago. The shares, incidentally, are almost exactly the mirror image of the 1997 general election result when Labour got 44% to the 31% for the Tories led by John Major. The Lib Dems…

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Time to make money on McNulty’s money-making?

Time to make money on McNulty’s money-making?

Take the 5/1 that he’ll have to pay some back William Hill have just put out a press release about a new market on whether Harrow East Labour MP and minister, Tony McNulty, will have to pay back some of the £60,000 of taxpayers’ money he claimed for the mortgage on a house he owns in his Harrow constituency where his parent live. You can get 5/1 that he will have to pay at least some it back. As has…

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To Play the Queen

To Play the Queen

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…

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Could Gord go on governing with this result?

Could Gord go on governing with this result?

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”…

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Could Gord going be a disaster for Dave?

Could Gord going be a disaster for Dave?

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…

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Has Gord “bet the farm” on a G20 success?

Has Gord “bet the farm” on a G20 success?

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…

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It’s no change across the board from YouGov

It’s no change across the board from YouGov

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…

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