Has Dave worked out a way of dealing with Brown blanking him out? One of the ways that Brown sought to dominate the media coverage after his first PMQs in July was to make an announcement in answer to a question – thus diverting media attention away from his performance and that of David Cameron. So we saw the news on the casino re-think and cannabis come out in answers to friendly Labour MPs and there was fairly coverage of…
How the papers are reporting the “Magpie Budget” As I’ve discussed here many times my main form of political betting is to “buy” and “sell” the number of seats that Labour will get at the next election. Because this is spread-betting you can realise your profits or cut your losses at any time. You can also operate without having to lock up any cash up by opening a credit account. The critical thing, if you want to end up in…
Or does it make Labour look weak? So there we have it. Exactly eight days after the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, announces his inheritance tax plan to the conference and Labour Alastair Darling follows suit with his own scheme. Would this have been in the Chancellor’s statement at all if the Tory plan had not given the party such a post-conference poll boost? Does it all look so obvious? Is it actually an admission that we’ve reached a stage where…
Are the Lib Dems the big losers from the conference season? The regular monthly Populus poll for the Times is out this morning and the shares are, compared with the last survey from the firm last week CON 38%(+2): LAB 40%(+1): LD12%(-3). It is important to note that the fieldwork took place over three days, from Friday to Sunday, and all but 200 of the interviews had been carried out before news of Brown’s election retreat became known. The big…
The spread betting markets are unmoved For what must almost certainly be the first time ever Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus is putting the Lib Dems on zero seats for the next general election. This is based on feeding his weighted average of recent polls into his commons seat calculator. The result appears above. So if you believe it there’s a fortune to be made on the spread betting markets. The latest Lib Dem Spreadfair prices are SELL 46.5 seats and…
Did his comments about the polls sound convincing? The first stage of Brown’s fight-back started with his monthly press conference when, inevitably, he was pressured on the circumstances leading upto Saturday’s announcement. Later in the day he has the Iraq statement in the Commons followed by a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party. The big question, of course, is how is this going down with the public? Will Labour stem the flow to the Tories in the polls? The weekend…
Can he mount an effective fight-back from the election retreat? One of the things that we don’t really know about Gord is how he’ll respond when he is under fire. For almost throughout his career he has managed to avoid public situations where he’s faced a severe grilling. During his time at the Treasury Brown always stood back and let members of his team put themselves forward when the difficult issues, like the level of fraud in the tax credit…
Could Henley become a tasty Lib Dem by election prospect? One aspect of Gord’s non-election decision is that Boris Johnson won’t be put into a difficult position over whether to stick as MP for Henley or not. For if there had been an election and he had not stood he could have found himself out of front-line politics if he then went on to fail in the mayoral race. Last week he was quizzed repeatedly about the dilemma and hinted…