This comment was posted by Cicero on the previous thread and given a good account of the mood in the baltic states which I reproduce here in full. A must read to understand what’s going on “ “I attended a business conference at a hotel in Tallinn last night, and afterwards we were having a coffee in the hotel lobby when the Putin speech came on CNN. The Estonians and Georgians in our party were very grim faced indeed. This…
Are restrictions being eased too early? Just as the Johnson government was sharply criticised for the delay in bringing in restrictions two years ago I wonder whether the latest move will similarly be seen as a mistake. In many ways Johnson’s desire to return to “normality” is commendable but but he is taking a gamble. It will be interesting to see whether the public will view it positively. Also while we wait for the Met report on Johnson this might…
The above is from the Opinium day of the General Election survey that it carried out in December 2019 and a particular area of Interest is why the LAB vote slumped so dramatically. It will be recalled that what was then Corbyn’s party saw its vote share drop from 40% at the previous General Election to 33%. The above findings focus on LAB defectors and as can be seen it was Corbyn’s leadership of the party that was the biggest…
As has been widely speculated whatever the Metropolitan Police decide to do about Johnson then it will be bad for the Prime Minister. If he gets a penalty ticket that raises into questions about some of the denials that we had when reports of what went on at Number 10 during lockdown started to seep out. If he doesn’t get a penalty ticket then it is the “One law for them and one on for us” narrative once again. In…
Last October, those heady days, when Boris Johnson and the Conservatives were seemingly unassailable and people were wondering if Labour would ever lead in the polls under Starmer, I wrote a piece that the economy might be the issue that makes the next general election more favourable for Labour so this polling from YouGov is something I am intrigued by. What must really alarm Conservative strategist is that a majority of Conservative voters think the government is handling inflation badly….
One of the many good things Smarkets have done is regularly have a market up on opinion poll leads. With eight days left in February I can just about understand these odds but my inclination is to back a Conservative lead this month. If they follow their usual schedule I’d expect a YouGov poll later on this week and Opinium poll on Saturday, by happenstance they are the pollsters with the smallest Labour leads with leads of 4% and 3%…
Sunak has been favourite for the Conservative leadership for so long now that it is almost becoming an established fact that this will eventually happen. But does he have the backing of enough MPs and is the betting price wrong? At the start of February when everything looked very bleak for Johnson many became convinced that we were about to see a confidence vote against the incumbent Prime Minister. But that didn’t happen and I wonder whether that was down…
Keir Starmer has it in for Jeremy Corbyn. Ever since Corbyn was suspended from the Labour Party in October 2020, following the EHRC’s critical report into antisemitism complaints under his leadership*, he and his allies have insisted that this was just a cover by Starmer to force him out of the party. While his party membership was reinstated in November 2020, his Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) membership was not and he remains an independent MP to this day. Just because…