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Month: August 2005

Has being leader made Charles happy?

Has being leader made Charles happy?

1999 2005 Could Blackpool be a turning point? Before the Betfair betting exchange felt it had had to get respectable it ran lively markets on whether politicians and others apparently in trouble would hold onto their jobs. The whole David Kelly affair and the Hutton inquiry had very lively betting and Charles Kennedy’s failure to make his party’s response after the 2004 budget statement saw the money piling on both for and against the Lib Dem leader. Sadly we cannot…

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Robin Cook: 1946-2005

Robin Cook: 1946-2005

The third of his generation to die so young I’ve been away all weekend and it is only now that I am able to start a thread on Robin Cook – the former Labour Foreign Secretary who will always be remembered for his resignation speech just before the Iraq War started in March 2003. Almost exactly a year ago on Politicalbetting we were speculating that in the event of a hung parliament then what we termed the “Ginger Alliance” of…

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Tackling the bald issue head on

Tackling the bald issue head on

How Tony Blair’s holiday host “prepares” for an election According to the Independent this morning the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has had a secret hair transplant at a clinic. Unfortunately it was less secret than he would have liked and “…acting on inside information, a correspondent of Rome’s La Repubblica newspaper was on hand outside the private plastic surgery clinic in Ferrara”. The report goes on“…eight hours later, the Prime Minister made his exit, staggering from side to side,…

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Is compulsory voting Blair’s secret weapon?

Is compulsory voting Blair’s secret weapon?

Will imposing fines on non-voters ensure that Labour stays in power? To Labour officials the party’s supporters must be exasperating. For there’s a big gap between the number who say they support the party and those that actually vote. If some means of boosting turnout can be found, they believe, then Labour’s grip on power could be even stronger than it is at the moment. Labour’s Plan A was to make voting easier. Making postal voting available to everybody seemed…

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Will it be third time lucky for David Davis?

Will it be third time lucky for David Davis?

2001 2003 2005? Three faces of the man punters think will take on Gordon Brown Yesterday’s attack by David Davis in the Daily Telegraph on multiculturalism was a foretaste of what we can expect in the coming weeks as leading contenders for the Tory leadership try to position themselves as the right person to stave off a fourth successive General Election defeat. The Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, has been here before. In the 2001 contest he came joint bottom…

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Just when will he step down?

Just when will he step down?

Could the handover take place the day after polling day? For two and a half months we have been saying repeatedly that Tony Blair will go on as Prime Minister for much much longer than received wisdom had it and those that followed our advice in mid-May are sitting on some promising bets. Ten days after the election we said “The markets think he’s going in 18 months – don’t believe it”. The latest speculation following the comments by his…

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Baxter prediction: Labour majority 118

Baxter prediction: Labour majority 118

But why are the pollsters being less transparent? In what we think is Martin Baxter’s first prediction for the next General Election a big increase in Labour seats is projected from the calculation which involves applying the average swing in the latest polls to what happened on May 5th and applying them on a uniform national basis in each seat. The Baxter calculator is one of the great tools for those who try to forecast and bet on elections but…

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Why my money is staying on Cameron

Why my money is staying on Cameron

Is the old Etonian the “natural successor to Blair”? For somebody who only came into parliament four years ago David Cameron has moved very quickly and it says a lot about his political and media skills that he has established himself as the main challenger to David Davis. When people discuss Cameron they focus on his old school and hardly anybody comments on his “day job” before 2001 as the PR boss for Britain’s biggest ITV company. This guy is…

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