PB.C “Blair Third Term Index” at 22.7%
November 22nd, 2005
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Has the PM turned the corner after the Terror Bill defeat?
The collective view of people prepared to risk their money predicting political outcomes is that Tony Blair has a 22.7% chance of completing the majority of a normal third term as Prime Minister.
Using implied probabilities based on historical and current betting prices we are making a regular feature of how punters are rating the key political issues. Our first - the betting market assessment of Labour winning most seats at the next General Election - was on Sunday. Today we focus on the political gamblers’ view of how long Tony Blair will stay at Number 10.
There are many different betting possibilities and the one we have chosen is the market on him still being at Number 10 after January 1st 2008. Although betting on these long-term markets is relatively light it does show the levels at which punters are tempted to bet.
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As can be seen there has been a sharp movement since the summer and now the market assessment is that he has a less than a one in four chance of still being there at the start of 2008. In August the rating was in the high 30s.
The big driver in recent weeks has been the defeat on the vote on the Terror Bill although there is just a sign that a recovery is on the way. We think that there is good value at the current price level on Blair staying and in coming weeks a lot depends on how he handles his fifth Leader of the Opposition. We think that he will do quite well and the third term index will rise.
We also plan to run “Gordon Brown” and “Hilary Clinton” indexes.
Mike Smithson
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What I deduce from the chart is that Blair’s fortunes revive in the third week of an odd-numbered month!
This site needs a competent astrologer
Well done on producing these betting markets graphs - invaluable databases that reflect what people have been willing to actually put money on rather than spin - and first suggested by me I believe
O/T - I see that the grand coalition in Germany has overcome the first hurdle and actually voted for Merkel as Chancellor.
Mike which bet is this derived from?
Can’t find a “Tony Blair completing the majority of a normal third term as Prime Minister” bet.
4 - Guido:
There are many different betting possibilities and the one we have chosen is the market on him still being at Number 10 after January 1st 2008.
A poll after the long gap since the last one - Labour swing of 2.5% from the LibDems, with Tories still becalmed. Lab 38 (+2) Con 33 (no change) LibDem 19 (-3). This follows the pattern we found in Sunday’s canvass reported here, though our ultramarginal status may be increasing the Lib->Lab swing (or our canvassing may be over-optimstic or too small a sample) as we found a larger switch (12%).
Although there’s been a good deal of discussion of the invisibility problem for the LibDems (see Steve Richards in the Indy today),if I were a Tory I’d be mildly concerned too. Publicity doesn’t get better than they’ve had in the last few months, but most people seem just not interested in them. They should get a bounce when the winner of their contest is announced, but after that it will get harder.
The poll is mainly about attitudes to pensions (retirement at 67 and all that): the graphic contradicts the article, unfortunately, though either way opinion on later retirement is divided, but most people want near-compulsory contributions.
Should have got the clue from the article - doh! Thanks.
For those who remain interested… voting so far in the Conservative leadership election was 53% by Monday’s post. Seems quite a few are leaving their envelopes on the mantlepiece longer than last time.
Re *. Or abstaining
3.Lennon, she got 397 votes. CDU/CSU+SPD have 448 seats.
Greens+Linke+FDP have 166 seats, the “no” got 202.
12 abstentions and a non valide vote.
To-day’s poll must be disappointing for Conservative leaning political anoraks. Months of publicity and glowing articles which it seems no-one except for them have noticed. Or worse still have noticed but have found unimpressive.
This article from yesterday’s Telegraph posted by Rik written by Alice Thompson makes the assumption that most Tories seem to make; that the rest of us see the world as they do. Here’s a quote from the article;
“Meanwhile the Tory leadership race has surprised everyone by catching the voters’ imagination. They couldn’t care less about Pink Pussies. What they see are politicians having fun again. David Cameron and George Osborne have all the energy, charm, enthusiasm and moderation that Mr Blair and Mr Brown once had. Boris Johnson has Mo Mowlam’s charisma and blonde mop. David Davis is as good at collecting scalps as Robin Cook. They are a new phenomenon”.
I know very few people who would agree with a single word in the above paragraph! Yet as a Tory writing in the Telegraph married to a Heathcote-Amery this is the sort of article that misleads her readers into thinking everything is rosy and victory is round the corner. Can you imagine a writer on the Guardian saying “The country is bubbling with excitement at the thought of a Cabinet position for…….(fill in your own name)”. Perhaps Its time for the house magazine to rejoin the real world and stop writing such nonsense?
11 - Given you have a near pathological hatred of Tories do you really think its a surprise that so few people you know seem to have anything posititive to say about the Conservative party?
I think she goes a bit OTT in the article but the leadership contest has been more positive than many Conservatives could have hoped for. And with a lot less bitterness than our opponents would have wished for. However even given that is it really surprising that the British Public are not yet ready to back a party that doesn’t yet know who it’s next leader is going to be?
8. Assuming a further 5% to 10% are in the post and a turnout of 79% (the same as last time) that would mean between 73% and 80% of votes have now been cast.
Please keep posting this information if you have it each day.
I noticed Nick Palmer also made a reference to this poll on the other thread. Where was it published and who was the pollster?
14. ICM in the Grauniad.
“Boris Johnson has Mo Mowlam’s charisma and blonde mop.”
Does this total lack of perspective imply that ALL Tories are on drugs these days? Boris J has the charisma of Fozzy Bear.
16 - He’s no Miss Piggy right enough but Fozzy Bear has loads of charisma!
11. I would pay more attention to the polls after the leader has been elected and in his job for at least 100 days before writing off the effect of the last 6 months.
It seems that Roger has accused the Telegraph of being more partisan that the Grauniad whilst citing a Labour-pleasing poll commissioned by the Grauniad.
I read the Grauniad for two weeks recently and whilst there was some intelligent, considered opinion, there was also a notable about of childish, irrational Tory-bashing (especially from a certain P.Toynbee).
if we concede boris can you tories all accept that George Osborne has none of the following: “energy, charm, enthusiasm and moderation”
he may be bright but he is deeply creepy and people don;t like that
Hang on, whilst I am usually the first to pounce of Roger’s nonsensical ramblings, he (and NP earlier) does have a point here. As a Tory with lots of Tory friends, I don’t detect such a huge surge in interest due to the leadership contest. The only thing that has happened is that a lot of people have heard of David Cameron and know he is allegedly “new”. Any further reading of the electorate is rather “in the bubble” I fear.
Having said that I also with woody662 in that it will require a few months to see the flow-down effects in the polls. Blair did not get a massive bounce by being nominated; and in this contest only Ken Clarke could possibly have got any instant bounce because he was already a known quantity - all the others are a mystery to voters.
19. P.Toynbee-Tory bashing. Surely not.
20. I don’t think Osbourne is creepy. He has a certain Tory Boyness about him which I’m sure will subside over the years. Mandelson is creepy.
It’s as well to remember that at an equivalent stage following the last General Election (i.e. Autumn 2001) Labour were 10-15% ahead of the Conservatives in all polls and much more on MORI - not 5% as in today’s - with the eventual difference being 3%. Draw your own conclusions!
19. You seem to be suggesting that they’ve doctored the findings of this poll. While one can legitimately dismiss the partisan ramblings of Toynbee et al. for their obvious tendentiousness, hard poll evidence that shows that the Tories have not moved from 33 since the general election is a different matter altogether.
23 - Yes, rather than draw the conclusion that the Tories are five points behind Labour, let’s use the well known statistical tool extrapolating a five year trend from a completely different time period onto today’s figures to conclude that this means the Tories will win the General Election by 2-7%. Good grief.
23. My conclusion would be that Labour are a lot less popular than they were four years ago, but that the Tories have done very little to capitalise on that unpopularity.
Talking of the Telegraph, I was delighted to read Peter Wilby’s dissection of the new look Sunday Telegraph in last week’s New Statesman. Before I read it, I knew (to paraphrase a character in a Kingsley Amis novel) why I disliked the new look fluffy ST, but didn’t know why I disliked it so much. Now I know - it’s trying to be the Mail on Sunday.
Much as I find the Mail on Sunday a guilty pleasure, I’d sooner buy the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph as it used to be rather than buy the Mail on Sunday and a pathetic imitation of it. Were it not for Matthew D’Ancona and Niall Ferguson’s columns, I wouldn’t bother with it.
On the other hand, I’m amazed that Peregrine Worsthorne should have said the Guardian is for him. Once he’s read Madeleine Bunting, he’ll soon learn his mistake. He seems to think that Polly Toynbee is rapidly becoming the exception to the rule - Bunting makes Toynbee look very middle-of-the-road. Stuart Jeffries is fairly sanctimonious as well.
25 - The comparison with the same period from last time is hardly irrelevant. We are in a far better position than we were in the aftermath of the 2001 election and the leadership contest - that I’m sure many of our opponents hoped would degenerate into a bitter, internicine war - has been fairly well received.
The fact that few people know who our leader will be or what our policies will be is bound to have a depressing effect on our polling when people oare being asked to decide who should govern the country. As Woody says the real test will come a few months down the line when we see how the polls go.
What has been encouraging is that we haven’t lost support to the LD’s when they could have used this time to present themselves as the real opposition when we’ve been spending our time sorting out the leadership.
24. Not at all. I’m merely suggesting the ‘papers tend to stress poll findings that suit a story they might like.
Richard, I was also bemused by Peregrine Worsthorne’s musing on the media last night. I don’t read the Sunday Telegraph but I’m told it is soon to be coined the Tittigraph due to the gratuitous use of photos of scantily-clad women accompanying stories.
woody and anatole make perfectly fair points, I think - it’ll probably be next summer before we can really get a feeling for how things are going.
Those German votes are interesting - that’s an awful lot of secret defections from the nominal majority in the vote.
29. Seems to me that at this stage of the electoral cycle absolutely no-one’s makig a splash about any poll findings - indeed only Nick’s posting drew this one to my attention. Besides which I discern a widespread hostility to this government across the media as a whole - the last thing any jounalist seems to want is a Labour resurgence. The press coverage of the Tory leadership campaign has been really very benign - and mainly beacuse large parts of the media are so desperate for a Tory revival - admittedly, not the Guardian - but even the left-leaning media strike me as hostile to Blair - and they either want to see a coup d’etat to get rid of Blair and all his supposedly ‘Tory’ reforms, or the Lib-dems emerging as the new progressive force.
Nick Palmer and others, why do you imagine that we Conservatives would be improving in the polls before the election of our new leader is complete? Who in their right mind would say to a pollster in effect I have changed my voting intention to the Tories without even knowing who the leader is?!
Surely the real stories in this polling data are:-
1) No post election Tory ‘meltdown’ as in 97 and 01
2) No ‘tories split’ stories anywhere
3) Labour vote still sagging at unsustainably low levels, Labour will not win another election unless they can get their popular poll support over 40% and keep it there - ask John Major.
4) The Lib dems are losing support to the Conservatives and not winning it from Labour - therefore they are the real losers at the moment, as is also supported by by election results everywhere but Scotland.
As I said on a previous thread about this, the Conservatives should start worrying if, after choosing a new leader and especially assuming it is Cameron, we are not three to five points further forward (firmly in the 38-40% range)at the end of his honeymoon period, probably by next June or July.
“The press coverage of the Tory leadership campaign has been really very benign”
Excepting “Dumb and Dumber” of course.
21 - Sounds fair enough Mac. I would argue that Osbourne has both energy and enthusiasm; I’ve never met him so I can’t comment on charm. He seems quite amusing - but I have a higher than average tolerance for geeks and politicos. But I agree with the general thrust - he is a little sinister, and not the sort of person to make Tories out of floaters. So I’m happy to concede Osbourne if you concede Boris.
Mind you, this journalist is clearly a bit of a fool. If she was as starry-eyed as she claims in 1997, she deserves the disillusionment. If she believed in miracles then, maybe she does believe in miracles again. But I can’t identify at all with the tone of her piece - I felt no particular joy at Labour winning in 1997, nor about Tony Blair engaging his European counterparts in a bike race for the cameras - and as a consequence, I can’t really take seriously her claim that ‘the mood is changing’.
33. Indeed, as you appear to accept very much the exception that proves
.. the rule!
I think real evidence seems to lie in council by-elections. What do these show? I think slight movement towards Tories, although direct comparisions are difficult given movement is against last time the seats were contested.
32 - Marcus , I think you would expect some omprovement in Conservative standings in opinion polls despite having no leader simply on the grounds of the increased non negative publicity the leadership election has generated .
you are incorrect in your assertion that Labour needs 40% support to win another election . Even with the boundary vhanges Labour will get another majority with around 36% of the vote whereas the bias in the system against the Conservatives will mean they need around 41-42% to achieve a majority .
All in all the polls show little change from the standings at the beginning of the last GE campaign .
It is true that local council byelections show some movement from Lib Dem to Conservative but in most cases this is clearly down to differential turnout rather than people changing their votes .
This is an interesting website looking at the Thacther years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/4447082.stm
Re. 29, indeed, another sign of the Sunday Telegraph aping the Mail (the Mail has long been satirised by Private Eye for seizing on any excuse to publish photos of girls in bikinis). All this under a female editor as well…
Richard, why should anyone be surprised by Peregrine Worsthorne thinking the Guardian is for him? It’s about 10 years since he’s expressed any opinion that could be regarded as anything other than left-wing?
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