politicalbetting.com

Can the Prime Minister survive 2006?

It was Peter Oborne in the Spectator earlier in the month who observed that David Cameron and Gordon Brown had an extraordinary shared strategic purpose - they both want Tony Blair out as soon as possible.

Brown’s desire to take what he regards as rightly his is probably the most documented political drama of modern times - and the longer he has to wait the greater the chance of something going wrong. Cameron’s desire to get Blair out of the way as soon as possible so he is facing Brown is only now becoming apparent.

Martin Kettle describes it like this is today’s Guardian: “Cameron has twin tactics for making the Conservatives electable. The first is to move the Tory party from the right to the centre. This week’s Guardian poll shows just how well that is going. ..the second tactic is equally simple. It is to get Blair out as soon as possible. Early days these may be, but those Cameronian embraces of Blair have a cold logic. The aim - aided and abetted by the Daily Telegraph’s rediscovered bias - is to divide Blair from his party in the hope that a Labour revolt will clear the Tories’ most formidable foe from their path. If Blair is forced out, Cameron will paint Labour as the enemy of change and reform. He will say that the Tories are the party that can achieve what Blair failed to do. And he may very well succeed. Because important parts of that message would be true.”

The Education Bill is the current big issue and the public expressions of unease by John Prescott show the challenge facing Blair. If he waters down the Bill he gets attacked by Cameron while if he doesn’t there’s the prospect of a big Labour rebellion.

Even if the Prime Minister skirts his way round this problem then other issues will emerge and he will face the same challenge again.

But nobody ever got rich underestimating Tony Blair’s ability to survive.

Time and time again the betting markets have been indicating an early departure but each time Blair has bounced back. We’ve had going into the Iraq War without UN sanction, the Hutton Inquiry and the rebellion earlier in the year on tuition fees and in each case Blair came out on top.

For those, like me, who get pleasure in viewing politics as a spectator sport 2006 looks very promising. Will Blair survive? The form books indicates that he will but there’s a new Opposition Leader to deal with.

For betting on when Blair will go click here.

Mike Smithson

Brown succession worries cause Balls price to ease

One market we have not looked at for some time is “who will succeed Gordon Brown as Chancellor?” In one of those quirks that sometimes happen on betting markets the close Tory colleague of David Cameron, George Osborne is now 5/1.

For Osborne to be Brown’s successor Tony Blair has to continue right up to the General Election, the Tories have to win, and David Cameron has to decide to leave Osborne with the Treasury brief. You would also be locking up your money for, perhaps, four years. Just 5/1 for all of that seems ungenerous to say the least.

This seems to have been caused by a very light market and a change in sentiment about Ed Balls - former close adviser to Gordon Brown who became an MP in May. A month ago Balls had tightened to evens but he’s now moved out to 2.75/1 - probably because his future is very much linked to Brown securing the leadership and this is not quite as certain as it looked.

Balls is always popping up to give interviews when Gordon is not available which would normally seem odd for a rookie back-bencher. But Balls is no normal MP after being Brown’s closest adviser for a decade. Negatives are his hectoring style which seems stuck in the 1990s and his powers as an orator that make David Davis’s infamous Blackpool speech sound good.

Just after the General Election we suggested that the then 4.2/1 Balls price might be a better way of profiting from Brown succeeding than the odds-on price then being quoted on the Chancellor. The argument being, of course, that Brown would choose Balls to take over at Number 11. Given Gordon’s less than certain position now and Balls’s underwhelming performances anything tighter now should be avoided.

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Mike Smithson

PB.C Labour General Election Index down to 55%

The spate of opinion polls following David Cameron’s election as Tory Leader of December 6th has reinforced the betting market assessment of Labour’s chances of winning most seats at the next General Election. From a peak of more than 66% during the Labour conference in September the implied probability based on best betting prices has now dropped to below 55%.

Unless there is a Labour recovery in the polls in the New Year then it might not be long before Cameron’s Conservatives move into the favourite slot.

Opinion seems to be divided between those who think that the Cameron effect has put the Tories on the road to victory and those who dismiss the 39 year old Opposition Leader’s media honeymoon as a “Nine Day Wonder”. There seems to be three things in Cameron’s favour.

Before drawing firm conclusions we need to wait until at least February’s polls.

SORRY FOR THE PROBLEMS We have had a serious hardware problem which has closed the site for most of the week. We are now on new equipment.

Mike Smithson

Guardian leader: “Get used to it: the Tories are back”

The monthly ICM poll in the Guardian confirms the trend of recent other surveys and has Cameron’s Conservatives still ahead but doing even better against Gordon Brown.

The shares compared with the last ICM poll nine days ago are CON 37 (nc): LAB 36 (+1): LD 21 (nc). But to the question of how people would vote if it was Cameron’s Tories against Brown’s Labour the split is CON 41 (+1): LAB 36 (-1): LD 18 (nc).

So yet another poll has Gordon Brown doing much worse against the Tories than his party and will surely impact on the betting for next Labour leader.

Gamblers usually respect the Guardian ICM poll more than any of the four regular surveys that come out each month and it usually has an impact on the markets. In summary the pollster puts the Tories 4% up this month against Blair’s Labour leadership, 8% up against Brown’s, with the Lib Dems down 2% and 5% respectively.

Another betting market that might be affected is the one on when Blair will eventually go. There are many different options but a good barometer is the one that he will still be there on New Year’s Day 2008. The latest price is 2.3/1. In our view the poorer that Brown does in the polls the greater the chance that Blair will remain.

For the message from this poll for Labour is clear - replacing Tony with Gordon makes the party’s prospects even worse.

Overall the poll found that 66% of voters see David Cameron as a “potential Prime Minister”. Even 51% of Labour voters and 63% of Lib Dem ones regard the new Tory leader in this light. Of those saying they would vote Lib Dem in the survey 46% said that “Cameron was someone they could vote for”. Apart from this the Lib Dems will be quite pleased with their latest ICM figures. Still being on 21% in spite of all the negative publicity over their leadership must be a lot of consolation and might reinforce Charles Kennedy’s position.

In a leader under the heading “Get used to it: the Tories are back” the Guardian notes:- “The message is hard to miss. A lot of voters like what they see. The sceptics should get real about Mr Cameron…. the message is a sombre one for anyone who thinks that Mr Brown offers an instant boost to Labour’s chances compared with Mr Blair. The evidence of this poll is that at present he does not. It is Mr Blair’s presence that keeps Labour in contention..”

Mike Smithson

Even if true Cameron would still not get a majority?

With so many political developments taking place every new opinion is being put under great scrutiny and the latest, from Mori, has the biggest shock so far. If confirmed by other pollsters the change in opinion it represents could totally change the landscape of UK politics.

For the poll in the Observer reports an astonishing turnaround in the fortunes of the Tories since David Cameron became leader. Mori’s “certain to vote” top-line figures give the party a nine point lead. These are the shares compared with the last Mori poll in November. CON 40 (+8): LAB 31 (-11): LD 21 (+2). So a 10 point Labour lead in November becomes and 11 point Tory lead less than three weeks later. This is a sensational change.

A concern that I have always have about MORI polls is that they are not weighted by past vote. This is a mechanism that ICM, Populus, NOP and YouGov use to try to ensure that they have a representative sample. You ask what people did last time and weight responses broadly in terms of the General Election result. The Mori approach is to report in their to-line figures only those “absolutely certain to vote”

When MORI asked the Best Prime Minister question - Brown led Cameron by 31% to 27%. This was caused mostly by the pollster’s methodology and the way it presents results. The voting intention questions include only people certain to vote, while the questions on best Prime Minister included all respondents. In November the all respondents Mori figure had a staggering 17% Labour lead.

When Mori present figures in this way then they should be consistent. They have one lot of top-line figures and all the other data should be based on that. My rough back of an envelope calculation has it that Cameron would have been significantly ahead on best PM if only those included in the voting intention figures had been included.

The next major poll should be the December survey for the Guardian by ICM which should be out tomorrow or on Wednesday. An ICM survey just over a week ago had the Tories ahead. Will they still have a margin?

Putting the Mori vote shares into Martin Baxter’s famous calculator which seeks to assess each seat based on a uniform national swing we get: CON 317: LAB 249: LD 48. The Tories would be seven seats short of an overall majority.

Mike Smithson

Is it because only they think he’s doing worse on the economy?

While the big focus in the past few days has been on the Lib Dems the major leadership issue in UK politics is on Labour because who is chosen to succeed Tony Blair will almost certainly become Prime Minister. Charles Kennedy’s future has almost no impact on that one way or the other.

The full data-set from Populus ’s December Times poll that had Cameron’s Tories beating Brown’s Labour by five points has just been made available and it is fascinating looking at the detail to examine current voter dynamics.

It might be a polling quirk and you have to tread carefully when looking at subsets of data in opinion polls but it appears that only 76% of those saying they are Labour supporters would definitely back the party if the Chancellor was up against Cameron.

Of the rest 5% said they would vote Tory and 5% Lib Dem with 4% saying they would not vote. The “don’t know” proportion was 9%.

By contrast total of 91% of Tory supporters would go with their party and the “seepage” from the Tories to Labour was just 1% with the “don’t know” figure at 4%. The only boost for the Chancellor was that 5% of Lib Dem supporters would switch to supporting Brown’s Labour.

Later questions on the economy provide something of an answer. Only 37% of Labour supporters agreed with the statement that “Britain ’s economy is doing well - largely because of Gordon Brown’s policies & decisions”. Just twelve months ago the figure was 64%.

Yet Lib Dem supporters seem to be viewing Brown’s performance in a totally different way. A total of 31% agreed with the statement - an increase of 12% on a year ago. Even Tories in the survey were more likely to agree on Brown’s contribution compared with December 2004.

So there has been a big fall in confidence on his management of the economy amongst Labour voters while Tory and Lib Dems think he is doing better.

In the betting the best price on Brown succeeding Blair is 0.49/1.

Mike Smithson