Do his polling advisers need to delve deeper? In trying to explain how Gordon Brown and Labour have got into their current mess there appears to have been one driving force – the massive Labour poll leads that at one stage touched 14%. The party believed that everything was going its way and, inevitably, there was pressure to convert the apparent surge in support into a fourth successive Labour victory. Yet were the poll leads ever as big as they…
Best Conservative score since 1992 with ICM An ICM poll in the Sunday Telegraph has the Conservatives on 43, Labour on 36, and the Lib Dems on 14. Changes on the previous ICM poll are +5, -2, -2, representing a swing of 3.5% to the Tories. However, Brown still leads Cameron 52-32 on the strongest leader question, while Labour leads by 47-36 on the economy. Other findings are that 66 per cent of those surveyed want a referendum on the…
A guest article from Innocent Abroad Recently I’ve been involved in a local campaign to save a well-loved doctors’ surgery (its previous partners have included AJ Cronin, the author of “Dr Finlay’s Casebookâ€). The problem arose because the partners needed to sell their premises, as one of them was retiring. The Primary Care Trust decided that it wouldn’t treat this as an accommodation issue, but insisted that the doctors gave notice and then bid in open competition for their own…
Is it too late to enter the race for the Democratic nomination? Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize has naturally led to speculation that he might seek to have one last roll of the dice and enter the 2008 Presidential race. The current odds for the Democratic nomination on Betfair have him available at 7.6 (13/2 in traditional odds), with Hillary a short-priced 1.46 and Obama at 8.8. It says something for Gore that his odds are shorter than…
Has Labour Lost the Overspill Estates for Good? From the late 1940s to the 1960s, when land surrounding London was cheap and plentiful, many London authorities built large council estates in the surrounding Home Counties. These varied enormously in size, from a few hundred houses in places like Ashwood Road, Potters Bar, through to estates of many thousands, in places like Borehamwood, Harlow, Loughton, Hemel Hempstead, Crawley, Hatfield, and Stevenage. Such has been London’s expansion over the years, that some…
But those 40% plus Tory shares should be worrying Too often, I think, those with a passion for following the fortunes of our great parties seem to expect instant reactions from the polls to the events they see daily in the papers and on their TV screens. So Brown has been having a torrid few days and yet Labour is at 38% in the latest Mori poll trailing by just 3%. That could have been a lot worse and I…
Mori shows a 5% swing to the Tories since its last poll A Mori poll for the Sun shows the Conservatives on 41, Labour on 38, and the Lib Dems on 11, which represent changes of +7, -3, -5 since the last Mori poll taken shortly after Brown’s speech to the Labour conference. This is a swing of 5% to the Conservatives, although fieldwork dates remain to be confirmed. These figures are identical to the recent YouGov poll showing a…
Will Alan Johnson come under pressure to resign? In what’s been a dreadful week for Labour, there’s more bad news for the government today with the 90 deaths from the C difficile bug at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. Health secretary Alan Johnson has described the deaths as “scandalous” and has told the trust to withold any severance pay to the chief executive who resigned last week. A police investigation has begun, with the possibility that the trust may…