When does agreeing your sorry mean you are not sorry? On the first full day of Labour’s new team the main political story is how Harriet Harman is dealing with comments during the campaign in which she appeared to suggest that Labour should say sorry for Iraq. This is how the Guardian is reporting what she said in the Newsnight debate on May 29th: “….the candidates were asked: “Do you think the party should say sorry for what has happened…
When following the polls and the markets can be expensive? If things had been going to plan I would have spent yesterday in Manchester with the Sky News team acting as one of Adam Boulton’s pundits at the Labour leadership conference. Thankfully circumstances prevented the trip because otherwise I might have been associated with the TV station’s wrong call, along with the Daily Telegraph, that Alan Johnson had won. For it’s all too easy to get carried away with what…
This is how the Telegraph web-site reported the “news”. My guess is that it will not stay on the site for very long. Sky was also calling it for Johnson almost until the end. Mike Smithson
With only minutes to go before the contenders are told there’s been a late move to Harman – as our chart showing the odds represented as an implied probability shows. Mike Smithson
What happened when Major replaced Maggie The table which I have adapted from the ICM web-site shows what happened to the party ratings in the ICM Guardian polls before and after John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher in November 1990. Polling, of course, was very different in those days and nothing like as accurate as it is today. Major went on to win the 1992 general election with an 8% lead on the national vote – something that none of the…
Should Gordon be thinking of a July election? This month’s monthly Ipsos-Mori survey, published in the Observer this morning, underlines how well Labour is doing following nearly seven weeks of almost uninterrupted positive media coverage. These are the figures compared with the May survey which was published first on Politicalbetting – CON 36% (-1): LAB 39% (+4): LD 15% (-3). Like most of Mori’s major polls the survey was carried out using face to face interviews and took place over…
But is Cameron in danger if he “goes on about Europe? The above is from a survey that was funded by the former UKIP-backer and Yorkshire multi-millionaire, Sir Paul Sykes, on public views on whether there should be a referendum on a new EU treaty that gives more power to Brussels. Given the overwhelming view on this and other questions in poll there clearly could have been better ways to start the Brown premiership. But there’s nothing the incoming PM…
Are Blair-Brown winning the spin war over the Euro summit? If there is one symbol above all that represents “Britishness” (G. Brown please note) it is, surely, the British sausage. For after that wonderful Yes Minister programme all those years ago it’s a good metaphor for Britain’s relations with the EU. Viewers will no doubt recall the classic episode of the programme when a distracting tactic was drawn up to “save the British sausage” as a mean of boosting the…