Is this the woman who could help determine the date? This is Deborah Mattinson, joint chief executive of Opinion Leader Research, a pollster for the Labour party for the past two two decades and someone who is likely to play a key role in advising Brown on whether to go for an early general election. In recent months she has been a big critic of one or two surveys that have not been favourable to the Chancellor. Brown will need…
What questions give the best measure of views on Cameron and Brown? A few days ago two pollsters that I have a lot of time for, YouGov and ICM reported increased Tory leads in opinion polls they were carrying out at exactly the same time. Yet when the two firms got to asking respondents to rate Brown and Cameron against each other for Prime Minister their findings seemed contradictory. The YouGov sample split 43-34 in favour of the Tories on…
What are we to make of “The Mole’s” prediction? One of the great additions to the UK online media in the past year or so has been the news magazine The First Post. A feature I always look at are the regular articles under the banner “The Mole” who is billed as a “Downing Street Insider. Shortly before the Chancellor rose to his feet to make his pre-Budget statement “The Mole” published a piece suggesting that Tony Blair will be…
Are the stakes getting higher for Assistant Commander Yates too? According to Independent this morning Downing Street has been pressing hard for Tony Blair to be treated as a witness and not a suspect when Assistant Commander John Yates holds his expected interview with the PM in the next week or so. Everything comes down to whether Yates decides that Blair should be given a caution at the start of the interview – a decision which could have a huge…
Does the latest price offer value for money? After being sceptical for a long period about Gordon Brown’s chances of making it to Number 10 I changed my view in early October when the price moved to 0.56/1. I got enough on then to cover most of my betting on other contenders when it became clear that nobody else looked able to emerge. As the chart shows there has been a very big change of sentiment since the period after…
Month by month how Cameron’s first year compares with Blair’s With virtually every political commentator wanting to get into the act of writing something about Cameron’s first year I thought I would take a different tack and compare his fortunes with Tony Blair in the twelve months after he got the Labour leadership. By taking the Mori and ICM poll ratings from Blair’s first year in 1994-95 I’ve produced two charts comparing the Blair poll movements with those that Cameron…
What could this mean for tactical voting? Detailed data from the November YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph, has the pollster showing for the first time that Lib Dem supporters prefer a David Cameron Tory government to a Gordon Brown-led Labour one. The views of declared LD supporters run against the trend of the poll where the Tory leader saw a decline in his lead amongst all the sample to CON 43% – Lab 34% to the question “If you…
But Brown rated “Best PM” by 29-25% A new ICM poll for today’s News of the World shows a sharp increase in the Tory lead over the past survey by the pollster twelve days ago. The shares are with changes on the last survey CON 39% (+2): LAB 30% (-2): LD 20% (-2). In slightly contrasting figures Gordon Brown was rated at 29-25% over David Cameron when those in the survey were asked who they thought would be the “best…