Does anybody want to bet that I’m wrong? There’s a rather a desperate sounding piece in the Telegraph again this morning by Simon Heffer headed “Cameron mocks the ‘loonies and fruitcakes’ of UKIP at his peril” in which he tries to argue that the Tory leader is wrong not to take the UKIP threat seriously. Heffer’s problem, like for all those on the right, is that Cameron has them over a barrel. The Tory leader has gambled that he can…
John McTernan – Director of Political Operations BBC News is confirming that Downing Street’s director of political operations, John McTernan, has been interviewed for a second time under caution by police in the honours probe. He is currently seconded to the Scottish Labour Party to run its campaign for May’s key elections. According to the report the interview took place before Ruth Turner, the prime minister’s director of government relations was arrested. The above list, reproduced from the Downing Street…
This week: Sell Johnson & Blair The new weekly markets on Politicians’ Popularity offered by IG Index give us the chance to pit our wits with their market-makers on a regular basis. Mike has kindly given me the opportunity to share some analysis and tips each week; hopefully these will provoke some debate and also be profitable in the long run – we shall see! A few posters have commented on the unpredictability of the results – opinion polls naturally…
The Guardian’s pollster has the Lib Dems going up five points The monthly ICM survey for the Guardian which has been going continuously for nearly a quarter of a century records a sharp jump for the Lib Dems and shows that the Labour deficit would be bigger if Gordon Brown was leader. The main vote shares are with changes on December – CON 37% (-3): LAB 31% (-1): LD 23% (+5). When the second question was asked – how would…
Brief preface – I am a Labour MP who prefers to post occasionally and anonymously, as it gives me the opportunity to be more outspoken than Nick Palmer, Stewart Jackson and others can be. First the leadership election. Everyone in the PLP now agrees that it’ll be Gordon unless he falls under a bus. Consequently, people aren’t as interested as they used to be in whether there will be a contest or not. The best outcome for him would be…
Honours probe developments cause punters to re-consider The latest betting on the Blair departure date has Q2 at 1.14/1 and Q3 at 1.28/1 with everything, it seems, now dependent on the honours probe. After all the talk of him leaving in early July the developments on Friday have caused some reconsideration. But this one remains very hard to call because nobody knows how the Yates inquiry is likely to pan out or what the PM’s reaction to it will be….
John Reid backers make the most in the new spread-betting market My first experience of the new IG Index weekly spread betting market on how twelve leading politicians would rate over the week in YouGov’s BrandIndex surveys has proved to be a costly one. I had thought that David Cameron was having a bad week with all the news of UKIP defections, a poor showing for the party in a Yorkshire poll and a couple of Tory donors getting very…
Could bad polls this week affect the Blair departure date? If ICM and Communicate Research are following their normal schedules then the fieldwork for their January surveys will have been taking place this weekend – just as the war of words between some senior Labour figures and the police reached a new height. So we will only have to wait a couple of days to find out whether what appeared to be a concerted strategy to rubbish the police is…