Nearly everyone in Westminster says the same thing when you ask them if there will be an election early in 2009: Brown should call one but he won’t. The thinking goes that the worst probable result for Labour early next year is a narrow Tory majority and the best one is Labour as the largest party in the Commons. By contrast in 2010, Labour could get absolutely shell-shacked.
The new YouGov poll today has Labour no longer rising in the polls, it is steady on 35 while the Tories are up one to 42—Jonathan Isaby thinks that this trend is enough to see off the prospect of an early election. But there is reason to believe that these numbers will get substantially better for the Tories over the next 12 months. As Andrew Grice writes in The Independent:
“cabinet ministers do not expect the “Brown bounce” in the polls to last once the toll of job losses and company closures mounts in the new year.
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