What if the party’s paymasters say he has to go? The founder of the MORI polling organisation, Bob Worcester, has made the most astute observation on a day that has been dominated by the future of Gordon Brown. In a Radio 4 interview he said that it wasn’t the men in grey suits “that Brown has to look out for, it’s the men in black suits, from the trade unions, as they are the paymasters now..The party is skint, and…
Wikimedia Commons “Your turf accountant… doesn’t have a clue” Amongst all the articles about Brown and Obama today there’s this piece by Alan Watkins in the Independent. [The odds] are largely made up – to begin with, at any rate. I once talked at length to a representative of one of our largest bookmaking firms, who specialised in political betting. It was, he explained, a very small part of their turnover. They did it for the sake of the publicity,…
Grim reading for Gordon today – is the endgame finally approaching? The newspapers are dominated by moves to unseat the Prime Minister – with the battle lines for the succession being drawn up between Jack Straw’s “Lancashire Mafia” and the Miliband/Burnham/Purnell “Primrose Hill Pact”. The Independent reports that Andy Burnham and James Purnell, in echoes of the Granita deal, will give David Miliband a free run for the leadership in the event of a contest, allowing him to emerge as…
Why are Mike Huckabee and Bill Richardson no longer being touted for VP? Today’s front page of the Wall Street Journal leads with claims that both Obama and McCain are about to announce their VP choices in the coming week. They give a list of prospective candidates on the ‘Narrow List’ that everyone here will be familiar with from our discussions. For McCain, Governors Pawlenty (MN), Crist (FL) and Palin (AK) join Carly Fiorina (CEO of HP), fmr Governor Mitt…
Has Hillary’s loss helped future female Presidential hopefuls? I’ll start with a controversial premise: Hillary Clinton failing to win the Democratic nomination might well have been the best thing that could have happened, from the perspective of those who like the idea of living under a female President of the United States. I have little doubt that Hillary Clinton would have beaten John McCain – largely because she was better equipped to secure Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida than Obama,…
Will this add to Brown’s agony? The panel shows the details of the latest ComRes poll for tomorrow’s Independent and the 22% margin over Labour is the largest that the pollster has ever recorded. According to firm “..the Tories are mobilising their core vote much more successfully than their rivals. Some 96 per cent of people who think of themselves as natural Tories plan to vote for the party, compared with 77 per cent of natural Labour supporters and 82…
Blair Freebairn helping us to understand more the battles ahead “The curse of dimensionality†is a term used by statisticians to describe the exponential increase in complexity as you add variables (aka dimensions) to a problem. So, in the interests of simplicity, political commentators rarely venture beyond one dimension; this is most limiting in the traditional reporting of swing, changes in vote share are reported using a single number. However one of the defining themes of post-war elections has been…
Are we now in the final days of the Brown premiership? In the aftermath of Glasgow East the rumblings have started and the issue that’s going to dominate politics in the immediate future will be Gordon’s survival. Can he hang in there until the next election or will something bring the issue of his leadership to a head? In May I got quite a lot of money on at 6-1 and 5-1 that he would be out during 2008. That…