Ballots & Bullets

We’ve been producing end-of session reports on the behaviour of government MPs at Westminster for almost a decade. Last year’s was a record-breaker: Coalition MPs rebelling more often than MPs in any other session since 1945. This morning we’ve launched the report on the 2012-13 session. It tells a more nuanced story, but with plenty to concern the party whips:…

If you are a political scientist or a political historian or – like me – some hybrid of the two, you really should avoid predicting the future. That said, put a microphone and a camera close to our faces and most of us will do just that.

In the early days of the current coalition government I was asked by …

This is the twenty-fourth in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than …

Image by David Spencer

Yesterday’s post detailing how Labour perceived David Cameron’s debating skills before the 2010 leaders’ debate was a bit of a success.  Several people asked if I’d seen the material about Nick Clegg or Gordon Brown. Indeed, I had.  And so, again with the permission of its author, Theo Bertram, here is Labour’s pre-debate briefing on …

This is the twenty-third in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than …

This is the twenty-second in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than …

The media caravan has already moved on, but for the record here are five more observations about the boundaries vote, in increasing order of importance.

1. Not that it really matters but we think the Commons authorities have miscounted.  The result was announced as 334 noes (to which need to be added the two tellers), but we count 335 …

Yesterday’s Commons vote on the electoral boundaries was a headache for the Conservative Party. The vote – an attempt to over-turn an amendment made in the House of Lords – failed by 334 to 292, making the Conservative task at the next election harder, by around 20 or so seats, than it would have been had the revised boundaries gone …

Since the 1970s it has been widely accepted that incumbent legislators in a number of countries representing single member districts have enjoyed an advantage in their bids for re-election. In the US, for example, the high incumbency advantage has meant it is often extremely difficult to remove a sitting legislator – so much so that Ronald Reagan was not entirely …

At 3.24am this morning the number of Liberal Democrat councillors dipped below 3000 for the first time since the party was formed.

If you were being pedantic you’d query that statement.

What really happened was that at 3.24am (when sensible people were fast asleep), I noticed that according to the BBC’s figures, the Lib Dems had lost more than the …