politicalbetting.com

Will this put the election retreat back on the agenda?

The main lead in the Guardian this morning confirms how serious Labour was about going to the country in late October or early November and could provide further ammunition for the Tories as they seek to attack Brown.

For according to the paper “nearly a million pounds” was spent in the run-up compared with just £200,000 by the Tories.

The report notes that three million letters had been printed and were binned; “hundreds of thousands of pounds” had been spent polling in marginal seats; poster sites had been pre-booked and paid for and many staff had been hired.

In one instance a lorry load of office equipment had to be turned back on the Monday after Brown’s Saturday decision.

A report from Labour’s general secretary is going to the party’s national executive today. One problem for Labour is that it is still £20m in debt and this additional expenditure will add to the overall financial problems.

Interestingly the Tories also had to pre-book billboard advertising and the current EU referendum campaign was apparently devised to use the spaces that had been paid for.

In many ways this report is not really surprising. It simply underlines that an election was being considered very seriously and clearly those charged with running the campaign had to plan and that involved spending money.

A challenge for Brown is that it could call into question some of the statements he was making in the immediate aftermath of the “no election” announcement. In particular what he said at the press conference on the Monday afterwards will be subject to a lot of scrutiny.

No doubt that this will be raised at PMQs on Wednesday.

In my betting I am retaining my position as a seller of Labour seats on the spread markets. My exposure is not on the scale of earlier in the month when I had a £100 a seat commitment - so if there was a drop of 10 seats in the Labour spread I made £1000 but stood to lose the same if it went in the other direction. There hasn’t been much movement over the past week and a half but a clutch of end month polls are due in the next ten days.

Mike Smithson

Is his former special advisor out of control?

After all the controversy over the role of schools secretary, Ed Balls in hyping up the early election date speculation there’s an intriguing account of some of the goings on between Number 10 and Number 11 during the final year of Tony Blair.

It comes in a serialisation of a new biography of Blair by Dr Anthony Seldon the first part of which is published in the Sir Paul Dacre’s “Mail on Sunday” today. Dacre, of course is a close friend of Brown’s.

One extract is very revealing about Balls. “..it gives a revealing insight into the tensions in Mr Brown’s inner circle with a series of venomous disclosures about one of the Prime Minister’s closest allies, Schools Secretary Ed Balls..The book claims that Mr Blair protested: “I feel like an abused and bullied wife,” after Mr Balls was “astonishingly rude” to him during talks between the camps last year over when he should leave No 10..According to Dr Seldon, out-spoken Mr Balls also turned his fury on Mr Brown when he refused to step up the pressure on Mr Blair to resign..The book claims that when Mr Brown returned to his office after failing to trigger a full scale revolt against Mr Blair in a radio interview, Mr Balls reportedly told him: “You bottled it.”

Taking the early election speculation a few weeks ago and these extracts you get a sense that one of Brown’s key henchmen might be out of control. To turn on Brown and accuse him of “bottling it” says an awful lot about the two men’s relationship. It’s almost as though Balls was in charge.

Is it any wonder that he felt empowered to act in the way he did during September? For it was the Balls briefings that kept the early election story on the boil.

Since all that went pear-shaped Balls has been singled out by many as a main culprit. Will it stop him in the future? I doubt it even though the consequences for his boss have been quite serious.

Balls is so aggressive that you feel that he could land Gordon in it again at any time.

Mike Smithson

Is party funding about to become the next battle-ground?

This is Michael Ashcroft who in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List was placed in position 87 with an estimated wealth of £800m.

He’s a major donor to the Tory party and before the 2005 general election, as was reported here, he hand-picked a group of Tory candidates in marginal constituencies and then was responsible for providing extra attention and funding to help them with their campaigns.

This morning he is he main focus of a Labour attack. In a GMTV interview the chief whip, Geoff Hoon, is calling for restraints to be placed on money being spent in constituencies in the years up to a general election and not, like at present, just during the campaign itself.

This is going to be tricky territory for Labour - for as soon as they raise the party finding issue out comes the Tory proposal that there should be a £50,000 cap on all donations which would apply to each trade union as well.

This could have a devastating effect on the party which still looks to the unions for a large part of their funding.

The Tories are defending the selective constituency support by pointing to the allowances of upto £40,000 a year that sitting MPs can spend promoting themselves locally. Although Tory MPs benefit as well they hold far fewer seats.

Ashcroft said last week that “In the 100 or so marginal Labour-held seats that will determine the outcome of the next election, sitting Labour MPs in effect have a £4m-a-year head start.”

Brown could use his majority in the commons to force through legislation that protected Labour’s funding sources but impeded the Tories. This, however, has big political risks. It’s not long since there was the “cash for honours” row and being seen to act partially in this manner might not go down well.

Brown also has a problem that in such an argument there’s a dearth of articulate Labour spokesmen who can put a case lucidly and effectively. As I have noted before most of the heavy hitters from the Blair era are no longer there.

Mike Smithson

How will the polls be affected by a LD resurgence

We have not had any national polls since the dramatic announcement by Ming Campbell but my guess is that when we do we’ll see the third party increase its shares from the terrible lows that it has experienced in recent weeks.

For one thing that Ming’s resignation has done has been to get his party onto the bulletins once again - and usually the more the Lib Dems are in the news the better their poll ratings.

But that’s only short term. What really matters is the long-term and the question of whether the Lib Dems with a different leader will prove to be more popular. And if that comes about where will the support come from - Labour or the Tories?

For most of the recent resurgence in the Tory polling position appears to have been at the expense of the Lib Dems. Thus in the latest ICM survey 24% of those who said they voted for what was then Charles Kennedy’s party in 2005 said they were now intending to vote Tory. By comparison the proportion who had shifted from the LDs to Labour was just 10%.

A view is starting to emerge that a Clegg leadership will take more votes from the Tories while Huhne might be more of a threat to Labour.

This is all hard to predict and it could work the other way round. Tories in LAB>LD marginals might be more inclined to vote tactically for a Nick Clegg Lib Dem party than one with Ming or Huhne in charge.

In the betting there’s been a slight easing in Clegg’s price on Betfair. Yesterday morning you could have got 0.38/1 - today it’s at 0.47/1.

Technical problems. Sorry about the technical difficulties the site experienced overnight. Thanks to my son Robert for finding the time to fix it ahead of his trip to Paris to attend the Rugby World Cup final.

Mike Smithson

Hi all,

For the first time for about six months, we’re having some problems with slow database access. In particular, attempts to post comments, or stories are very slow.

I’m working on the problem and hope to have a solution soon.

Thanks, Robert

The State of the Parties

The last three months’ local by-elections have been the worst, in terms of seat losses, that the Conservatives have suffered for some time. Over that period, the Conservatives have made a net loss of eight seats, Labour a net gain of six, and the Liberal Democrats a net gain of two. However, analysis of changes in each party’s share of the vote suggests that the Conservatives still enjoy a substantial lead over the other two parties.

Thirty Seven seats have been fought by all of the main parties. In seats which were last contested in May, the Conservative vote share is down by 4.4% on average, the Labour vote share is up by 0.2% on average, and the Liberal Democrat vote share is up by 3.1% on average.

In seats which were last contested in 2006, the Conservative vote share is down by 4.3% on average, the Labour vote share is up by 0.4% on average, and the Liberal Democrat share is down by 0.1% on average.

These results imply that the Conservatives would, if projected nationally, be winning about 36% of the vote, with Labour and the Liberal Democrats winning about 27% each.

Contests in seats which were last contested in 2005 show a rather different picture. There, the Conservatives are down 3.5% on average, Labour are down 7.9% on average, and the Liberal Democrats are up 2% on average. These results should be treated with caution however, as there were only seven such contests, and the Conservative and Labour vote shares have been depressed by candidates from minor parties, particularly the BNP, standing for the first time.

Were these vote shares to be repeated in next year’s local elections, then Labour and the Liberal Democrats could expect to make modest gains from the Conservatives.

During this period, the BNP have fought eighteen seats in total, winning an average vote share of 14.9%. The Greens have fought fourteen, winning 6.7% on average.

Yesterday, a total of six seats were contested, all of them seats which were last contested in May. No seat was lost by any of the parties defending it.

Basingstoke and Deane Borough - Whitchurch: Lib Dem 858, Conservative 709, Labour 58. Lib Dem hold, with a small swing to the Conservatives.

Congleton Borough - Sandbach West: Conservative 445, Lib Dem 382, Labour 160. Conservative hold. This was a good result for the Conservatives, as the Liberal Democrats won this seat by four votes in May.

Ellesmere Port and Neston Borough - Rossmore: Lab 504, Conservative 325, Lib Dem 60, English Dem 30. Labour hold.

South Derbyshire District - Church Gresley: Labour 639, BNP 516, C 304. Labour hold. The BNP were contesting this ward for the first time, and came close to winning it from Labour, with 35% of the vote.

Wellingborough Borough - Croyland: Conservative 698, Laboru 448, Independent 125, Green 55. Conservative hold.

Wigan Borough - Wigan Central: Conservative 1013, Lab 827, Community Action Party 262. Conservative hold, with a small swing to Labour, compared to May.

Sean Fear is a London Conservative