As Matt says in his column today, only fools or knaves make predictions nowadays. So it’s with the caveat that prediction is a mug’s game that I make an A-Z of predictions for 2009 in my News of the World column today.
Having said that, it’s by no means a pointless exercise to say how the future looks now. In City terms, the fact that futures markets are wrong doesn’t make them useless. What people do today depends on what they think will happen tomorrow. As Anthony Wells brilliantly shows, it’s the expectation of an economic recovery that lifts Brown’s poll lead. When this expectation goes, as it will when confronted with reality, the Tories should find their lead returning to them.
Making predictions is the columnists’ equivalent of getting drunk and singing karoke in front of the office: sounds great fun at the time, but you’ll come to regret it later.
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