Which party will benefit most from the anti-hunting move? Whatever you might think of him you have to concede that Tony Blair is an extraordinary political strategist and he would not be pushing the hunting ban within a year of the General Election if he didn’t think it would help Labour at the ballot box. The veteran Labour MP, Dennis Skinner, put his finger on it when he told MPs earlier in the year – “there is not a subject…
bbc One of the UK’s leading experts on elections, Professor John Curtice, has added his weight to the view that we might be heading for a hung parrliament. In a powerfully argued feature in today’s Independent (it’s in the premium section so you have to pay to read it!) Curtice takes to task the view of “the Westminster village” that “theTories are going nowhere, so therefore Labour must be comfortably set for a third victory in a row. Yet such…
Is Kerry really 13% behind? Punters who’ve been basing their White House race betting on the opinion polls should read this before investing anymore money. According to this report Gallup – used by US Today and CNN and currently showing a Bush 13% lead – assumes that this November 40% of those turning out to vote will be Republicans, and only 33% will be Democrat. Apparently that’s how they make up the sample on which their poll results are based….
Have the pollsters and the punters got this one right? The betting markets, as we predicted, have closed down their books on the Hartlepool by-election and the only online market still operating, the Betfair betting exchange, has Labour at 1/5 favourites. But is there still a chance for Charles Kennedy’s party. Can the Lib Dems still pull it off in spite of that devastating NOP poll last Tuesday that had Labour 33% ahead? Polling methodology. From what we can gather…
Party workers win votes and seats With the spread market Labour price moving down and the election appearing even tighter the robustness of the party organisations is going to come under more scrutiny because this can decide seats. There’s absolutely no point in people supporting you if on the day they do not go to the polling station to put an X next to your candidate. Good work on the ground is vital and effective party machines can and do…
The money piles on Bush Whether this will help Tony Blair or hinder him the polls and betting continue to move in the way of his war partner, George W. Bush, in the race for the White House. In recent days the President has been attracting big support in betting markets on both sides of the Atlantic and now the best conventional price you can get in the UK is just on 1/2. It’s the reverse with John Kerry for…
The day the Tories lost it Today is the 12th anniversary of Black Wednesday – September 16 1992 – the day when the pound was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism after billions had been spent trying to prop it up. The day made currency traders like George Soros rich, it boosted Euro-scepticism, and it’s been described as “the defining failure of John Major’s government”. It was also the day that the public stopped trusting the Tories and they…
Punters who have been playing the Tony Blair and Party Leader markets will be intrigued by the comments from broadcaster, Melvyn Bragg, about how close the Prime Minster came to stepping down in the late Spring. At one stage in mid-May the price on Gordon Brown being PM at the General Election touched evens and the timing of this seems to coincide with the period that Bragg and others were talking about. What’s said to have changed Tony Blair’s mind…