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…
Introducing the PBC Average of Weighted Polls With David Cameron set to celebrate his first year as Tory leader on Wednesday we thought it would be a good time to launch PBC’s new measure of polling performance – the average of weighted polls. The numbers featured in the chart are from those firms which employ some system to ensure that their samples are not skewed by their methodology and are also members of the British Polling Council. The latest Average,…
Are Labour’s southern Problems getting worse? Some weeks ago, I wrote about the return of “Labour’s Southern Discomfortâ€, the instinctive rejection of Labour by Southern voters, in the 1980s. This showed up markedly in May’s local election results, and is now even more pronounced in recent local by-election results. Labour support, in local by-elections, has generally held up better in the North than in the South, particularly in the North West, where the party has actually gained four seats since…