Sunday 21 September 2008

Try and keep up

Obviously, the way to get a bit of publicity for your website is to do a sensational poll and give the story to a national paper. The Observer says:
Gordon Brown is set to lead Labour into an election bloodbath so crushing it could take his party a decade to recover, according to the largest ever poll of marginal seats which predicts a landslide victory for David Cameron.
Unfortunately, a p0ll on this scale (35,000 people) can be out of date before it's published. The Independent on Sunday as a poll suggesting that Labour has halved the Tory lead. This may itself not be entirely accurate but it shows how pointless it is to read detailed outcomes into a poll, however large, a year and a half before an election.

Meanwhile, some of the papers are desperate to keep the anti-Brown rebellion story going. The Times says that the rebellion has spread to, er, Charles Clarke. Also:
Tom Harris, the transport minister, risked censure by expressing sympathy with rebel MPs who called for a ballot. He wrote on his internet blog that the resignation of the Labour rebel David Cairns, the Scotland minister, was “based on honesty and principle” and that he “deserves respect for what he has done”.
Is that the best you can do?

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