The possibility that Gordon Brown could be leaving the Labour leader’s job has spurred our efforts to get a new masthead which is in a very different style to the old ones. In the four and a half years since we were established we’ve stuck with incorporating pictures of politicians in one form or another on the masthead. This was good at first but it required constant updating when new figures came in and old figures went out. It also…
Why are they always the first to respond? The “quickie” YouGov poll for this morning’s Sun has raised an interesting question from the previous thread from Nick Palmer MP. He wonders “whether YouGov is confident that the subgroup of their panel who reply to surveys within 24 hours are representative? No idea what sort of bias it might introduce, but worth a thought.” I agree and maybe someone from the firm might respond. What I do know is that the…
Is it time for punters to cash in on the annual polling quirk? On the face of it today’s YouGov poll is great for Labour, a warning to the Tories and bad news for the Lib Dems who have seen all their gains of last week just wiped out. In fact polls bang in the middle of conference season are usually totally misleading and merely reflect that whoever was on most recently was getting an extra publicity boost. This is…
YouGov: Con 41 (-3) Lab 31 (+7) Lib Dems 16 (-4) Two big stories from the UK and US tonight. At home, results from the YouGov poll for the Sun have given Labour a seven-point poll bounce in the wake of Brown’s speech to Conference. In the USA, McCain has called for the first debate, scheduled for Friday night in Oxford, Mississippi, to be postponed. He said he is suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to help deal with…
What’s the leadership fallout from Manchester? Gordon Brown – better conference than might have been expected. Speech OK with party activists and might expect a poll boost. Looks like he’ll survive at least until the 2009 local and Euro elections. Good conference. Harriet Harman – will have upset Tory supporters with the personal nature of her attacks on Cameron but went down well with the delegates. She’s still there and she owes her position a contested election of the whole…
Remember what happened here in the run up to the 1979 election? With suggestions going the rounds that that Geoff Hoon might replace Peter Mandelson as Britain’s EU commissioner in Brussels should we be preparing ourselves for a by election in his constituency at Ashfield in Nottinghamshire some time next year? The 2005 result is reproduced above and certainly with current polling and by election performances the Tories would fancy their chances. In fact a failure to win here would…
Has her timing been designed to deliberately damage the PM? Less than fourteen hours after Gordon sat down at the end of his big conference speech in Manchester there’s a report this morning from Sky News that Ruth Kelly, the former Education secretary and now Transport minister, is to quit. Only two days ago we carried a story here about an Independent survey where Kelly was named as only one of four cabinet ministers not prepared to answer the question…
But where are the Labour spread buyers? They might have been cheering in the conference hall in Manchester but the general election betting markets barely moved in response to Brown’s speech yesterday. If the speech was the “game-changer” that Labour hoped it would be then most punters did not notice. As can be seen from the chart above the Labour odds on getting most seats, converted into an implied probability, edged up just one percent in response to the speech…