Gordon Brown’s Manchester conference
September 29th, 2006
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Day by day - how punters views changed
I’ve been working with the Guardian this afternoon on help with a graphic on how gamblers have changed their views on Gordon Brown’s leadership chances as the week has progressed. The only problem I’ve had is that they’ve wanted the prices in old fashioned fractional odds - not the decimal-type that we tend to use here.
So if it is used tomorrow it will be a bit different from my chart above - which shows the movements and represents the best betting price that was available at any one time. It illustrates the impact of his speech on Monday, the reported comments of Cherie Blair that day, the reaction to Tony Blair’s speech and yesterday’s moves following John Reid’s address.
Mike Smithson
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i think we can safely say that very very little happened in terms of gordons chances and that he is still rock solid favourite. putting a graph withh david davis’s conference betting would highlight this.
in my opinion this conference was one of the best i have ever been too. the mentality amongst labour activists was as high as the 1990’s. Make no mistake if this week had gone badly then ;abour could really have headed into civil war but fortunatley it didnt and it appears that we will have an extreamly stable transfer of power, which considering the tories did last time they had a three time general election winner is pretty good.
2 Would like to see that overlay. clearly Gordon survived the week and no serious contender emmerged. The best he probably could have hoped for. It’s good to see that Labour has held its nerve.
mentality was as high as the 90s eh red flag…must be the re- classifiation of cannibis effect….
re 3. I think you ought to wait until there have been some polls before coming to any conclusion about whether contenders have emerged. My guess - borne out by the BrandiIndex in the following story - is that Reid will have received a very significant boost. He’s tightened from 21/1 on Saturday to just over 5/1 this afternoon.
If that is reflected in a leadership comparison and Reid, say, gives Labour a 3 point boost compared with Gordon against the Tories then Team Brown has a challenge. Sure there’ll be the usual technique of rubbishing the polls and smearing the messenger. But let’s wait and see. I reckon that if its within three points Gordon is OK.
Jonathan - you should know that if its Brown v Reid my personal choice is for the Chancellor.
Snowflake5 on “Comment is free”
“Regarding the Scottish business - David Cameron is an ethnic Scot isn’t he? Cameron is a Scottish clan. Plus he has a dose of Stuart blood in him through James I’s daughter. He’s a Scot in everything but accent! Strange that the Scots are so dominant in politics.”
So she’ll be withdrawing her support for Brown and Reid then?
The most successful labour PM in history was Clem Attlee. He and the forgotten chancellor, Stafford Cripps, set up the post-war welfare state, with very little money. There was none, straight after the war. Attlee never minded Bevan, Bevin, Morrison and the others taking the credit for their contributions. Sure, he only won 2 GEs, and one of those by a whisker—not like TB’s 3 clear wins. The difference is when you think about the legacy….
Then, there was no element of the minister who was the cleverest, or most committed, or the one with most ideas, or the best speaker, being made PM. Has the PM’s role changed that much? (With 24 hour TV, clearly the present day PM has to be the govt front man, so his oratory is now much more important).
Is GB the right man to be team captain? Is he the one to get the best out of the various minsters? Or is it simply that he feels that its his ‘turn’?
Interesting re Cameron http://news.uk.msn.com/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=1009914
7. “Is GB the right man to be team captain?” A good question. To choose a cricketing parallel, would Geoff Boycott have made a good England captain? A very good player - though not as good as he thought he was, prone to ignoring his errors (or blaming them on others), wants everything done his way and absolutely confident he knows best - which on occasion he does. I suspect that in both cases the result will be, or would have been, acceptable results to start with with increasing discord and dissent within the team.
On topic, would it be possible to see a graph of how the odds of the Labour leadership pretenders apart from Brown have varied over a similar timespan? I can’t see many betting opportunities on Brown as he’s moving within such a narrow band and although I still regard the odds as very generous, they’re well into odds-on and it could be almost a year before a payout. By contrast, the figures for the rest have changed quite a bit and where there’s turbulance there’s scope for a profit.
I like the cricketing analogy. The best player as skipper? Daft. Flintoff is an unbelievable choice. Ha hasn’t played cricket since he was last captain. (2nd test v Sri Lanka). In the second innings, he was rediculously overbowled (52 overs) by—himself.
If GB is as good as all the socialists seem to believe as chancellor, doesn’t it feel surprising that they can ‘afford’ for him to leave the treasury?
‘..would Geoff Boycott have made a good England captain?’
Boycott captained England in the 1978 tour of New Zealand. The three-match series was drawn one all.
re 10. David - who would you like me to show and over what time period?
12. He did, but New Zealand were hardly world beaters, though they had some fine players.
13. Reid and Johnson in particular. I’m not sure whether anyone else has shown up on the radar recently, but it would emphasise their lead over fourth to include at least one of Miliband, Benn or Hutton. For the timeframe, probably about a month or so - there have been spikes to both Johnson and Reid recently. Johnson dropped to about 6/1 with Reid at about 20/1 a little while before the conference, before Reid pulled it back and overtook again. I’ve not followed the figures in such depth to be able to suggest exact dates, I just think there might be an interesting story there: if there are two serious candidates (I’m ignoring McDonnell), it will be Brown and not-Brown. Neither seems able to make the break yet though both have had opportunities.
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15. Only in terms of probabilities. If you’re looking at the return on your money, it’s the right way up (and it’s certainly not back-to-front
).
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