In recent weeks Joe Biden’s struggles up the stairs of Air Force One attracted much comment from his opponents and critics. It is a bit of an awkward watch, for some reason it reminded me of Ed Miliband’s inability to eat a bacon sandwich. But Biden’s critics seem to be pushing various memes about Biden being weak and physically unfit to be President, if you want to bet on Biden not lasting the full term Ladbrokes have a market up…
Like millions of others I feel as though I’ve been cooped up in my home office for more than a year. Well I’m going on holiday to North Northumberland in the morning returning in a week to get my second jab. I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to waking up and have the above view from the bedroom window. PB will be in the capable hands of TSE. This has been a remarkable and sometimes uncomfortable…
Above is the latest Betdata.io betting chart of Betfair’s next General Election overall majority market and as can be seen another Tory majority is rated as just a 37% chance behind a hung parliament. Part of this maybe because of the way the market is defined. A CON majority for this purpose requires the Tory seat total to be more than 50% of the total number of MPs. That means 326 or above. This for betting purposes ignores the fact…
The concerns (scandal, if you prefer) in the Greensill affair are not primarily about lobbying, convenient as it is for current Ministers, Labour and journalists to describe it thus. Convenient for Ministers because they can stick it to a foolish, greedy ex-PM they don’t much care for and can claim to have it sorted by fiddling about with some more rules on lobbying. Convenient for Labour who can go on about Tory sleaze. Convenient for journalists since it is a…
With maybe 60% of people voting in this way the timing could be crucial Because of the ongoing impact of the pandemic it is estimated by the Tory elections’ expert, Lord Hayward, that the total of postal votes from the May 6th elections could touch be in the region of 50-60% of all the votes that are cast. The big element here is that once someone has popped their ballot into the post then there is nothing they can do…
Last week there was a big report in the New York Times about some of the high-pressure fundraising tactics of the Trump campaign. A feature that got special attention was that many donors who thought they had made one-off donations in the run up to WH2020 suddenly found that this had been deemed to be a weekly donation and money was being sucked out of their banks every 7-days. In many cases this had led to hardship. Apparently it was…
As non-apologies masquerading as apologies go, Cameron’s must win some sort of Missing The Point Award. Apparently, his correspondence with the Chancellor should have been more formal, as if what’s concerning people is him texting rather than taking out his pen and Basildon Bond paper when asking Ministers to look kindly on his employer, Greensill. Still, with the newly announced inquiry into his actions – though it must surely also be into the actions of current Cabinet Ministers when they…
As we all know the Hartlepool Westminster by-election is taking place on May 6th – the same day as the locals throughout England and the Scottish and Welsh Parliament elections. Nominations have now closed for the locals and these show that of the 31 council seats up for election in Hartlepool three weeks on Thursday there are just 13 CON candidates. Now I don’t know what to read into that, and there maybe local factors at play, but it is…