Could the “Vote for me” winner split the anti-Tory vote? Probably the best news of the week for Michael Howard is the decision of the winner of ITV’s “Vote for Me” series, Rodney Hylton-Potts, to stand against him in Folkestone. For if there had been a threat to the Tory leader it was from the Lib Dems who have it down at the top of their “decapitation list” and who might just have eaten into Howard’s 5,900 majority at the…
Some straws to clutch at If the Tories want to think positively there are a number of factors that could mean the election outcome will not be as bad as seems at the moment. “Conventional polls that use interviewers have got it wrong.“ There is a strong argument for saying that poll surveys that use interviewers are overplaying Labour and underplaying the Tories. The difference in Tory shares in interviewer-free polls like YouGov and Rasmussen in 2001 over the normal…
Will the pinks help the blues? One of the areas where the coming General Election will be unique is that the number of candidates from the main parties who are openly gay will be at the highest level ever. Perhaps surprisingly there are about twenty Conservative PPCs who have declared themselves including a number in target seats. One of them is Iain Dale in North Norfolk and a regular contributor to the site. Will their declarations of their sexual orientation…
What would happen to the “certain” bet with this scenario? With the Tories moving even further down in the spread markets Jon’s plan, for a “sure thing” General Election betting strategy could look even more promising. His plan is to combine a Tory buy spread contract at the depressed prices with a Labour winning most seats win punt on Betfair where the odds are now 1.17. The effect of the combination is that you are protected against a loss even…
Not a good weekend for the Tory leader A double blow for Michael Howard this weekend looks set to put even greater pressure on the Conservative price on the General Election spread betting markets. Firstly came the news that the former Higher Education minister, Robert Jackson, has defected to the Labour party. Secondly a new Populus poll in the News of the World shows that the Tories are falling back in the key marginal seats that they need to win…
A good value bet on the Chancellor? Gordon Brown’s high-profile African tour signing deals to ease the foreign debt burden of poor countries should go down well with many of the potential LD-leaning Labour supporters on whom the General Election result probably depends. It sounds like a bold initiaitive but as critics have pointed out it is one that it is not costing the UK tax-payer very much. The latest in Tanzania will provide an average of £4m a year…
Apologies to all for the server problems again today – made worse because my son Robert is skiing in France and I am less able to fix it. We appear to have a peak of demand in the late mornings on weekdays which our systems seem to have problems coping with. I hope everybody got lots of work done this afternoon and productivity increased across the nation. Mike Smithson
Could they really have planned it like this? An interesting theory is put forward by James Blitz in the Financial Times today suggesting that the the Brown-Blair row might be part of a “cunning plot”. He notes First, it helped to get the prime minister over a very bad start to election year. The idea that Mr Blair had misjudged the public mood over the Asian tsunami – staying too long on holiday – had begun to crystallise in the…