Could the outbreak close off the possibility of an October election? Six and a half years ago the last outbreak of foot and moth disease caused Tony Blair to move back the general election date as well as the local elections from the first week in May until June. There was even controversy then because the disease was not fully eradicated at the time the poll was called. For months last time the harrowing pictures of livestock being destroyed and…
The by elections help us to another record breaking month July was another record breaking month on Politicalbetting. We had a total of 759,452 hits which was only the second time we have been above the three-quarters of a million mark. The last month when this happened was in May when the total finished up at more than 772,000. Looking at the daily data, parts of which are recorded here, we got a huge boost on the day of and…
Is Labour’s margin really as big as it seems? Now here’s a funny thing – in the three Guardian ICM polls for January-March 2007 the firm was reporting leads for Cameron’s party of 6% – 10%. Yet looking at the raw data FEWER people were telling the pollster then that they planned to vote Conservative than in ICM’s three published polls in July. So for the 2007 Q1 surveys the average number of people saying they would vote Tory was…
Is Gordon following the plan of Blair’s former pollster? The revelation in the Daily Mirror this morning of a 2005 paper written by the ex-Blair pollster and major architect of NuLab, Philip Gould, raises the questions – is Gordon following the strategy and, if so, does this provide further evidence that an early general election is on the cards? Certainly what has happened in the past month seems to fit with what Gould was advising two years ago. This is…
What do we think of the Electoral Commission’s conclusions? As the BBC is reporting this morning all web and phone voting pilots should be halted according to a report from the Electoral Commission on the voting experiments that took place in parts of England in May 3rd. Then there were a series of trials including internet and phone voting, electronic counting, insisting that voters sign for their forms, and making town centre facilities available ahead of polling day so people…
My nomination – Paul Linford From the moment that West Bromwich MP, the unlovely Tom Watson, visited Gordon, Sarah and family at their Fife home during the first week of September the 2006/07 political year has been dominated by one subject – the Labour succession. For from that meeting Watson went on to resign his ministerial position apparently threatening a whole wave unless Tony stood down. It was unsubtle, it was brutal but it was highly effective. We then went…
Is this good news for the Lib Dems? In the next day or so Populus will be publishing the full detail of its latest Times poll and will be following ICM and now Communicate Research in showing how respondents answered based on what they told the interviewer they did at the 2005 general election. This is great news – for as anybody who has done anything more than the most basic campaigning knows the most important electors are those that…
Was Cameron right to reveal the peerage request? The ongoing saga that is the Tory party took another turn today with the revelation from David Cameron that Ali Miraj, the former parliamentary candidate who had attacked his leader, had only yesterday asked to be made a peer. My first reaction on hearing this on Radio 4’s Today programme was to think that Cameron had made a big error. But now I’m not so sure. I thought that Miraj came off…