Could we see a tightening of the early exit prices? It must be a near certainty that in the next few days or weeks Tony Blair will be interviewed by the Scotland Yard team carrying out the honours probe. When is this event going to take place? We don’t know but it cannot be far off. And when it does happen will the Prime Minister be asked questions “under caution”? Again we don’t know but there can be little doubt…
But poll junkies will have to wait for YouGov I was expecting to be leading this morning on the November YouGov poll which invariably features in the Daily Telegraph on the final Friday of each month. Well it does not appear to be there but for those those who need their regular “fix” of polling information we do have the full dataset from this week’s ICM survey for the Guardian. The main point from these numbers is that they reinforce…
Can the new leader solve the party’s financial crisis? The overnight news that all challengers in the coming Labour leadership contests are going to have to pay the party a “tax” of 15% on the campaign funds they raise is a further indication of the serious funding problem that the party is now facing. For a consequence of the “cash for honours crisis” is that big donors are, perhaps understandably, reluctant to make contributions and Labour has a campaigning machine…
Why not some smart third party politics? With Maurice Saatchi making coded attacks on David Cameron over “going for the centre ground” and the seemingly extraordinary suggestions about the Tories and Polly Toynbee isn’t it time for some smart opposition tactics from the Liberal Democrats. They should start be recalling one of the early actions the new Tory leadership. At the start of the year Cameron’s team came up with the novel approach of backing the Labour leadership as it…
But the Tory lead widens to 8% with Brown as Labour leader The headline General Election voting intention figures show a big improvement for Labour in this month’s ICM poll in the Guardian. The shares are with the changes on October CON 37% (-2): LAB 32% (+3): LD 22% (nc). This brings the pollster more into line with the other firms but still contrasts sharply with the 5% Labour lead in the same survey a year ago two weeks before…
Mori puts Brown 16% ahead of Reid for the leadership Partial details of the Mori survey for November have just been published on the Mori website and from the information that has been made available it looks as though there has been a steep decline in Labour support since October. Although we have not got the party shares the detail shows that 248 of the 980 who were surveyed said Labour with 466 saying other parties. By my calculation this…
Yet on the day nobody even mentioned it on PBC? With the honours probe hanging like a dark shadow over the government and being a dominant factor in the Blair exit date betting it is worth going back nearly eleven months to the Sunday Times investigation that sparked off the whole crisis for the government. For things look very different now than when the story first appeared. At the time the term “loans for peerages” was unknown and the building…
Was Blair doing the Chancellor a favour with his fighting imagery? As often happens in politics the initial reaction to a development or a speech can change quite drastically within a few days. Last Wednesday Tony Blair’s farewell Commons performance in a Queen’s speech debate was well received by commentators particularly his “put down” of David Cameron by threatening him with a “big fist” – a move seen as an endorsement of Gordon Brown. By yesterday there had been a…