politicalowl

The prediction  from the Daily Mirror pundit: Labour was on course to a dismal result ,,, the party's majority ,,, could be cut to less than 1000 in a head-to-head battle with UKIP, And the result: Labour's candidate Jim McMahon secured a 10,722-vote majority from UKIP's John Bickley, and a 62% vote share that was higher than at the general election. The Mirror's Dan Bloom was obviously not given the advice I was as a young journalist playing political  correspondent in Canberra for the first time. "The closer it gets to an event, the less definite should become your opinion" was how the then doyen of the Press Gallery Ian Fitchett warned me. People will laugh at you forever when your prediction is hopelessly wrong but hardly notice and never remember when you get it right. Get ready for the laughter Dan.

A couple of new polls this morning with predictions on what will happen on Thursday when they vote in the UK to elect members to the European Parliament. The   ComRes  poll in the  Independent on  Sunday  had UKIP clearly doing best and gave an explanation as to why its UKIP figure was higher than that of some other pollsters. One of those other was a  YouGov/Sun poll  that had topline figures of CON 22%, LAB 28%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 25%, GRN 10%. Labour are just ahead of UKIP in first place but the  Polling Report  website  commented : A lot of this apparent difference is down to how they approach turnout – YouGov’s topline figures are based on all respondents, if they took only those certain to vote UKIP would be ahead. ComRes’s figures include only those 10/10 certain to vote, if they included those who say they are 5/10 or more likely to vote UKIP’s lead over Labour would be a far more modest 2 points. The betting marke...