We do know that the mailing of ballot packs has been put back a bit and it would be useful to know when voting actually starts. So if you are a CON member can you let PBers know? It would be great as well if someone could post a picture of the blank ballot form.
Following Intelligence from GCHQ that the ballots of Tory members could be altered through online interference there’s been a delay in postal ballots being issued. Given that everything was focused on party members getting their ballot packs at the start of this week I wonder whether the delay could have an impact. On the face of it has given more time for Sunak to overhaul the apparent big lead the Truss has built up. What has been remarkable in the…
What might be a winner with one firm won’t be with another Over the next three months, the big political betting activity will be on the US Midterm elections. On the first Tuesday in November the whole of the House of Representatives will be up as well as about a third of the Senate seats. Elections for the latter take place every two years on a six year cycle in which about a third of the seats come up each…
I know that Johnson is on his way out but what better way to get some good publicity than inviting the victorious England Woman’s soccer team to a special reception at Number 10. There’s a public expectation that they should be so honoured as we can see from the numbers in the YouGov poll. Now the decision has been made it is going to be hard to go back on it. Mike Smithson
A LAB lead varying from 1% to 14% It is very hard to draw any conclusions from the most recent polling seen in the Wikipedia table above. The reason, of course, is the very wide differences the various firms are showing. We have the UK’s most established pollster, Ipsos, which still uses the phone, reporting a 14% LAB lead while YouGov’s latest has it at 1%. One thing we are not seeing is “herding”. I’ve been writing about polling for…
This was her “Dementia tax” day So far it’s been just about the worst day for Liz Truss for some time on the betting markets. As can be seen she has slipped sharply though she is still an 81% chance. What we have observed are some of her weaknesses and she has had to do a complete u-turn on her plan to cut public sector pay. She proposed this morning that civil servants’ salaries be linked to living standards where…
Truss will never have a better opportunity Looking back to the last time a PM was replaced between elections, 2007, I often wonder whether the course of British political history would have been different if Gordon Brown had called an immediate general election after taking over Tony Blair in the June of that year. The arrival of the new Labour leader at Number 10 saw the party to see a remarkable turnaround in the polls which was broadly sustained until…