But Cameron 15% ahead amongst “floating voters”

In spite of all the Tory publicity of recent weeks Labour is still on target for a comfortable fourth General Election victory according to ICM in the Guardian this morning – a view backed by the betting markets where Labour is the 0.63/1 favourite.

The pollster’s October survey shows the party shares at CON 33: LAB 36: LD 22 – the Labour lead is down 4 points on the month

A Gordon Brown premiership was favoured by 43% compared with 38% for David Cameron

If it was Brown against Davis the split would be 45% to 32%.

Amongst “floating voters”, however, ICM found that Cameron would lead Brown by 48-33%.

In the leadership contest the Cameron-Davis split was 59-20% of those saying they were “certain to vote” Tory in the next General Election.

In the coming weeks we expect more polls like this and we might see surveys showing the Tories ahead on General Election voting intention. The issue will be whether this can be sustained.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the developments in the Tory party have happened very quickly and we will get a clearer view of their impact in a week or so. Just fifteen days ago David Davis was still the favourite. Only three weeks ago the Cameron price on IG’s Binary bet market was 5-9.

Best betting exchange prices; Cameron 0.17/1: Davis 5.4
Best bookmaker prices; Cameron 1/10: Davis 11/2:
IG’s Binary spread-market. Cameron 82-90: Davis 10-18

ROUND 2 PREDICTION COMPETITION.
Paul Maggs reports. Following the second MPs’ vote and the elimination of Liam Fox, there is a three-way tie between Gary Barford (post 1), Clarke Ken (10), and Alex Williams (35), all of whom were just 4 votes out overall. The next best predictions were from Alasdair (57) with 5 and James M (23) with 6.

Adding together the results for rounds 1 and 2, the best combined score is Round 1 winner Stephen Thomas with 14, followed by Tabman and Ben with 16, and James M and Andrew M with 18.

Mike Smithson