How’s this going to play ahead of the election? The real danger of Jack Straw’s announcement that he’s using his veto to stop cabinet minutes on the Iraq war decision being made available under the Freedom of Information Act is that it could open up the whole episode as a political issue once again. Even though it’s nearly six years since it all happened Ministers have managed to fend off calls for an inquiry into the issue, which was so…
Can Huntsman impede the Bobby Jindal bandwagon? Today’s a big day in the 2012 race for the White House with prominent Republicans trying to position themselves as the best person to take on Barack Obama. Governors have been holding one of their regular meetings and tonight the young bright hope for the party, the Oxford-educated Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, will be making his party’s response to Obama’s address to a joint session of congress. This is a big moment…
UK Polling Report Is the outcome much closer than it appears? There will be 650 members of the next house of commons and if David Cameron’s Conservatives are going to win a majority then they will need a total of 325 seats or more. And if you input the numbers from today’s Guardian ICM poll into the UKPollingReport you get a projected total of 353 seats – or 28 above the magic number. This gives a comfortable overall majority of…
Guardian.co.uk What if this idea starts to take hold? One of the great weapons that editors can use to influence events is in choosing the questions that go into the opinion polls that they commission. Then, when they have the numbers, they can highlight specific findings which might fit with what the paper wants to achieve. So what are we to make of the Guardian’s splash this morning – leading on the numbers that are most damaging to Brown’s leadership?…
CON 42(+2) LAB 30(+2) LD 18(-4) …and Labour is back in the 30s again – just! Well after the excitement of the last ICM and ComRes polls that had the Lib Dems at 22% the latest survey from ICM for the Guardian has the party at 18 points – with both Labour and the Tories showing a 2 point increase on the last survey from the firm a week an a half ago. So the gap between the main parties…
..and congratulations to Roger on his Oscar performance Once again the long-standing PB contributor, Roger, produced a near perfect set of predictions on the Oscar winners and those who followed his tips made themselves a bit of money. This followed a similar record in 2008. This is getting to become a habit. The challenge this year was that there was so little value in the betting. But as is always said a winning odds-on bet is worth a whole lot…
Could over-stating Labour be a thing of the past? John Rentoul in his latest column for the IoS makes some observations about the polls which I believe are out of date and could give a misleading view of what will happen at the next election. He writes: “…Of course, the quirks of the system mean that the Conservative share of the vote has to be eight percentage points larger than Labour’s to win a Commons majority. But I suspect that…
When the music stops, will it be Likud and the Right? So, President Peres has asked Benjamin Netanyahu to try to form a government (he is now a formateur in Dutch / Belgian parlance), despite the fact that Likud finished second at the election – he has 42 days to do so. The immediate post-election posturing and positioning is over, Lieberman has returned from his holiday in Belarus and recommended Bibi for PM, and the real business of government formation…