Ed Davey, the only Lib Dem cabinet minister from the 2010-2015 coalition still to be be an MP, has now edged up to a 65% chance on the Betfair exchange on the election to choose the successor to Jo Swinson who, of course lost her to the SNP at GE2019. Quite what this is based on is hard to say but Davey, currently joint acting leader, has been getting a bit more media attention than his opponent, Layla Moran. It…
What became of Maurice Glasman? Only those of us with a tendency to don the proverbial political anorak will recall the name, but Maurice (now Lord) Glasman was once the intellectual guru du jour for Labour. With roots in the Living Wage campaign and community organization, Glasman coined the term Blue Labour, a profound policy reaction to the perceived human emptiness of Blairism and the Third Way. For a while in the early 2010s Ed Miliband seriously dallied with Glasman,…
The latest Ipsos MORI Political Pulse shows Brits to be more favourable towards Chancellor Rishi Sunak than they are towards PM Boris Johnson or LAB leader Keir Starmer. Some key points. 48% are favourable towards Sunak and 22% unfavourable. These numbers have not changed much since the pollster first asked the question in May where 47% were favourable and 18% unfavourable. Johnson continues to divide opinion with roughly as many favourable towards the Prime Minister (41%) as unfavourable (42%). In…
The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – has usually been seen as a hospital pass (any point during the Troubles), an internal exile for those having to earn their passage back to the mainstream (Mandelson) or somewhere to put rivals or nuisances (Francis Pym, Jim Prior). In some cases, PMs have trolled the residents of that benighted province (Shaun Woodward, Karen Bradley, for heaven’s sake!) Few have shone in the role. One who did was Julian Smith. In his…
The data points to a 7% CON to LAB swing since GE2019 in the “Red Wall” The polling expert and former President of YouGov, Peter Kellner, has an article in the latest New European based on his study of the data from the last four weeks of Opinium polls. Unlike most other pollsters this firm has a range of cross tabs that make such an analysis possible. These include vote splits in the seats gained by CON from LAB at…
It has repeatedly been said over the last five months that the only way that life can really return back to normal will be if an effective vaccine becomes available. There have been reports that more than 100 research teams around the world are working hard on the challenge and now we’ve got news about two of them. Firstly there is the Oxford vaccine which has attracted a lot of interest over the months because it was initially developed to…
Above is today’s polling from YouGov on the compulsory wearing of face masks when at work. As can be seen there’s a relatively tight split, within the margin of error, on whether those sampled back or oppose the idea. What I find interesting is the Referendum vote split with Remainers saying it should be compulsory by an 8% margin and Leavers saying it shouldn’t by the same margin. The compulsory wearing highlights presents ideologically difficulties for those who, like ex-UKIP…
We could be less than three weeks away from a decision My main political betting activity at the moment is on who Joe Biden is going to choose as his vice presidential nominee. He has to have this in place before the party’s rescheduled convention in middle August but there have been indications that we could know the name by the start of next month. I should state that my record in betting on Vice presidential nominees has over the…