My dilemma over being a punter and writing about it On most days on the site I like to produce a, hopefully, provocative article that’s linked to a political outcome on which people can bet. The problem is that what’s written here can sometimes affect the betting prices themselves and this can lead to suggestions that I’m putting forward ideas in order to line my own pocket. Until now I have always tried to set out what I am betting…
Has Labour’s Southern Discomfort returned? “Labour’s Southern Discomfort†was the title of an influential Blairite pamphlet in the mid 1990s. Last year’s general election results suggested that Labour was once again starting to struggle in the South, and East Anglia, and May’s local election results suggest this is an increasing problem. Across Southern England, and East Anglia, Labour holds just 1,775 council seats out of more than 10,000, 18% of the total. However, of these 684 are in London. Labour’s…
The man with better poll ratings than either Brown or Cameron Of all the ministers in Tony Blair’s cabinet the one who has the best approval ratings in the polls is the Home Secretary, John Reid. Last week YouGov found that there was a 9% margin in his favour when people were asked whether they thought he was doing a job or not. This is a substantially bigger margin than Gordon Brown, Tony Blair or even David Cameron currently enjoy….
How will the crisis affect Gordon & Dave’s career plans? With Tony Blair returning to London today to a Labour party where he is increasingly isolated how is the crisis going to affect domestic politics? Will it be the platform that Gordon can use to take over the job that he regards as his? And how is it going to impact on David Cameron’s General Election chances particularly after the warning from Tory funder, Stanley Kalms, about the party being…
After a good June do July’s results spell trouble for the Tories? In June the Conservative advance in local elections continued. The Conservatives were defending 13 seats this month and ended up with 17 seats (the majority of which were gains from the Independents). Mind you, they did manage to lose Nascot in Watford to the Lib Dems but it wouldn’t be a local by-election without a Lib Dem hiccup (remember Bromley?). So what does this mean in a national…
Would things have been different if Robin Cook had been still alive? If this had been a normal Wednesday then at noon Tony Blair and David Cameron would have been facing each other across the house at Prime Minister’s Questions. With the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, being in semi-open revolt against Blair’s line then there would have been a lot for the Tory leader and Ming Campbell to get their teeth into. For the one time when PMQs can really…
Although it is the holiday period and things are a bit quieter at the moment one of the big problems we have on the site are the demands on our servers when dozens of users are trying to load and re-load very long discussions all at the same time. This can make it frustrating for users because the site seems very slow and it also means that we are using up a lot of bandwidth repeatedly sending you the same…
Are we now in an era of more accurate polling? At the 2005 General Election I made several thousand pounds on a number of spread bets “selling” the projected Labour share. The spreads were very much in line with what the pollsters were reporting and I believed that they were over-stating the party. Thus one bet was at 38.5% against the actual 36.3% – meaning my winnings were the difference between the two numbers multiplied by the four figure sum…