What do people think of tonight’s PPB? This evening saw the much launch of Labour’s much hyped vehicle to attack David Cameron. If you did not see the party political broadcast you can download it here. I’ve played it several times now and I just cannot work out whether it’s very clever and is going to have an impact or whether it’s just boring. The central message seems to be – don’t trust this guy because he’ll say whatever those…
Was it just a tactic to deal with the pressure of the moment Cast your mind back to the events leading up to to Tony Blair’s dramatic announcement on September 30th 2004 that he would serve a full third term but would stand aside before the next election. For what Blair said in that short statement on the eve of him going into hospital totally dominates the current political environment. But was his commitment to step aside before the end…
Is Tory progress inevitably bad news for the Lib Dems? The primary focus of any general election prediction or analysis is on the fortunes of the two main parties. However an often overlooked aspect of a general election result is that of the electoral relationship between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. Since the 1950s it can be argued that the performance of these two parties have been intertwined to such an extent that their electoral performance is greatly dependent…
It’s 3-1 that he’ll be out by the end of the year There’s a lively market developing on the US-focused Tradesports betting exchange on whether Donald Rumsfeld will hold onto his job beyond the end of the year. With six retired US generals calling for him to go because of the way he has handled Iraq the issue of the Defence Secretary’s future has now been taken up by Democratic Presidential hopeful Bill Richardson. The Pentagon PR machine is fighting…
Could covert recordings rule Miliband out of the race? The Sunday Times has published further transcripts of the conversations between the city academies fundraiser, Des Smith and its reporter who was posing as an intermediary. The paper, which back in January first broke the “cash for honours” scandal, reveals that Smith recommended that the second favourite to become the next Labour leader, David Miliband, should be should be tagetted. At the time the Miliband price was 7/1. It’s now eased…
HOW RELIABLE IS THE NEWSNIGHT PREDICTION ? A week ago, Newsnight produced an analysis of local by-election results by Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings, which received considerable publicity. Studying this year’s local by-election results, they suggested that the national equivalent vote shares which the parties would win on May 4th would be CON 33: LD 29%: LAB 28 (compared to 34%, 27%, and 33% respectively in 2002). On that basis, Labour could expect to lose about 100 seats nationally, the…
Introducing PB.C monitoring on poll sample distortion Here’s a statistic that everybody interested in political opinion polls should take into account: If you make a completely random unsolicited phone call and manage to persuade the person answering to tell you how they voted in the General Election there’s a 44.7% chance that it will be Labour. This compares, of course, with the 36.2% of voters who did actually vote for the party last May – so the proportion telling pollsters…
Have honours been abused to boost a controversial education policy? Until the arrest yesterday of the City Academies fundraiser, Des Smith, I thought that Tony Blair would escape from the “cash for peerages” row relatively unscathed. After all the Prime Minister has survived an awful lot, from Bernie Ecclestone through to David Kelly and the Hutton hearings, that those legendary Teflon qualities would see him through almost anything. Now I am not so sure. For abusing the honours system to…