Will it be a third bloody session for Gord and his team? With a popular headline this morning being “Another day – another disaster” the Prime Minister cannot be looking forward to his weekly cross examination across the dispatch box at PMQs. This starts at noon. No doubt both Cameron and Brown have been preparing all morning and the interesting element will be whether there will be an attempt to pin the lost data issue on the Prime Minister. He…
Will Gordon be saying “move over Darling”? Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling cannot have expected good headlines this morning and reproduced above are a selection of the front pages. There’s no denying it – this is bad. There’s no respite on the inside pages. The Sun’s leader sums it up simply under the headline “Strike Two”. This is a story that looks as though it could dog the government for months if not years. The big political question is how…
Is this Labour’s biggest crisis in a decade? After what the Mole in The First Post is describing as Labour’s worst crisis in a decade of power there’s been movement on the commons seat spread markets so that for the first time since June Brown’s party is behind. In this form of betting you buy and sell the number of seats that the parties will get at the next election as though they were stocks and shares. Much of the…
News is just emerging about a statement that Alistair Darling will be making to MPs this afternoon about an “operation problem” at HM Revenue and Customs. It is said that millions of records have been “lost”. On the “Next Chancellor” betting market Ed Balls is now priced at evens. Mike Smithson
Could Hillary’s campaign be impeded by the first state to decide? The main headline overnight on the ABC news in the US is a poll it commissioned with the Washington Post on the state of opinion in Iowa – which on January 3rd will become the first state to make its decisions on the contenders for the 2008 White House race. In the Democrat race the black senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, is recorded as being in the top position…
How will the increasing crisis play in the polls? Back in September, in what now looks to have been a completely different political era, one of the great surprises was how the early stage of the Northern Rock crisis seemed to have no impact in the polls. In fact when specific questions were put polling respondents did not blame Gordon or Labour. It was the moment when I started to believe that Brown could really walk on water and I…
Was the front-runner right to make a formal complaint? In the introduction to the thread on Thursday’s Huhne-Clegg Question Time debate I noted that “there’s been a lot of edge between the two men during the campaign and there might just be fireworks.” Well it did not quite happen on that occasion but last night the contest, which has struggled to command much media attention, was topping the BBC bulletins after Nick Clegg made a formal complaint over the Huhne…
YouGov, like ICM, shows a big Labour deficit amongst the elderly On Tuesday I came under attack when I observed that the latest ICM poll had showed a very sharp difference in Tory lead amongst the 65+ age group. True – there is always a danger when you focus on sub-sets, like I was doing, that the picture could be be distorted. But when the same trend is seen across a number of surveys you can be more confident about…