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Crowperson

Listed below are comments made by Crowperson between Thursday, 23rd October 2008 and Saturday, 6th June 2009.

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Relieved and nervous 10:18am on 06 Jun 2009 Spider - not enough by half.

I want a Tory government too.

But I'm not going to get one at this rate. They still need to be averaging 40% - and then some - to win the election as the government vote usually improves on the day of a general election.

Sorry.
Relieved and nervous 09:40am on 06 Jun 2009 You may be pro-Tory, but you can't change the figures. 38% is down to what Michael Howard got in 2004, and we all know what happened to him. Cameron didn't win as many seats as the Tories need to win an election, and people were registering a protest vote against Labour which will largely come back at the election. That's the devil in the detail and the problem is the fall in support may not allow Cameron to reap the whirlwind. Mind you, personally speaking, Cameron has taken Howard's gains in 2005 and sat on them like the dog-in-the-manger, and the expenses scandal did for him as well (the polls started going down at the beginning of the week with the Independent ComRes poll putting them on 30% - and other polls putting them now below the 40% they need to win the election outright.

Labour voters may well be registering their dissatisfaction with the government but they will probably still vote Labour at the general election - even in 1997 for example the Tories still got 32%. At this rate the Tories may not have the solidity of poll results - largely due to their own laziness - to win the election, and since they need 150 seats just to break even, they have to be 10% ahead on polling day itself and above 40%. With margins likely to narrow during a general election they need to be leading by 20%+ - which looks doubtful due to the expenses scandal and Cameron's own issues with his own mortgage. Compared to Howard - 31st cheapest MP - I don't think the country will want someone on the fiddle to take on the running of the country.

However much Tories here stamp their foot at Nick and throw their ballot papers out of their pram - and I voted Tory in 2005 myself - they have got to realise that the figures do not now look promising. That's fact, not Nick's fiction.

I'm not a partisan, I don't like Cameron much but that's my democratic right. I didn't have a vote on Thursday, so I couldn't register my own opinion, but as likely as not if I had I would have voted Liberal Democrat (no Labour candidate in our Wokingham seat).

I can understand political reasons why people are upset with Nick but I can't understand personal invective against people stating their opinion.
Plague on both your houses ... 11:48am on 12 May 2009 The Tories have a way forward - focus on policy. Then they might not be so angry with this and might not have fallen below 40%. They refuse to do any work on policy and have been hoisted on their own nasty petard which has relied on things like Smeargate only focussing fire on Labour. They've been caught up now and need leadership to get them comfortable again as Labour's poll rating is artificially low - going into an election their results will stabilise but the Tories might therefore lose more points as a result. They are only miles ahead on paper and the decent thing would be for Cameron to put up a coherent manifesto now and campaign on that.

But he hasn't in the past and probably won't now. He has no right to be angry - live by the smear, die by the smear. Yet another failed leadership and yet another election loss, I'm afraid.
Irresponsible or prudent? 01:19am on 16 Nov 2008 @Oldboy - you are like the people in America who whinged for four years that Bush would also find a way of stealing an extra term or two or whatever.

Now proved wrong by events.

Claiming your opponents are the enemy of democracy is a sure-fire way to declare yourself one too.

Given the Conservatives now only have an average of an 8% lead I think it is high time they stopped acting as if they had already won the election and started trying to win it, otherwise Labour will be back sorting out their own mess. Osborne's comments about the pound were fair enough, (although I have a lot of money in euro savings from my Irish job anyway, so parity please if possible!!!) but his "scorched earth" comments betrayed a fundamental attitude of hubris which suggests to me that the Tories will continue to assume the election is won and therefore lose by default. They have even brought Oliver Letwin back now, who probably lost the last election for Michael Howard by trying to find elusive "waste" which never exists and is always generated by government.

Cameron seriously lacks judgement if Osborne was not bawled out for his comments on scorched earth. I don't expect much, but I don't want a fourth term of Labour, so personally if I were Lord Kalms I'd be calling for Cameron's resignation rather than Osborne's.
Stimulating the global economy 7:23pm on 15 Nov 2008 Given we have such a problem with our Prime Minister, why does his economic approval rating eclipse that of the Tories, and how will that affect any election between now and 2010?

Osborne's silly comments about "scorched earth" suggest the Tories are still not understanding that their bubble has, unfortunately, burst, and radical measures are needed to reverse the general trend.

Regardless of Brown's character or lack thereof I worry when the only alternative is Cameron and Osborne.
Stimulating the global economy 1:37pm on 15 Nov 2008 Osborne is an idiot but at least he isn't in power. However, if this is his latest offering, stating the bloody obvious, then I hope he never gets into power.

He is reportedly taking four months off to spend more time with the economy. I wonder whether we will hear any sense from him in that time; then he can go back to posturing and posing for the Tories and forget their needs because David needs him for a spin doctor.

He should be permanently put on notice - as should Cameron - that if any more flops like their Tuesday "tax increase" plan occur, then they should both carry the can. Cameron only announced it because Osborne was damaged goods, and damaged his credibility with the big City organisations alongside it by talking for two days about a revolutionary new plan and then offering a pile of pants.

I'm afraid the Opposition is just not up to much any more, so Gordon has open goals for all this mumbo-jumbo. The Tories no doubt claim they are saving their best stuff for nearer the election, but I think this is just beginning to look to me like they are saying "manana, manana" - while Brown is getting away with economic murder today.

Who will rid us of these turbulent priests?
Two political gambles 7:13pm on 11 Nov 2008 Regarding Brown appearing like Mugabe, I don't think so. Maybe he is trying to govern the country? If you don't like it, I suggest you go to Zimbabwe for a few months, then come home and see what the difference is.

I agree with the comments about the BBC and Michael Howard - as a Tory activist last time round - but think that Cameron has had the opposite problem - too little scrutiny of his non-policies. He is getting more of that now that the polls are going down for them - like it or not, the Brown bounce exists - and neither he nor his blogger friends like it because it presupposes that politics is dynamic and back-and-forth and that people change their minds.

I will vote Tory, incidentally, just hopefully not for Cameron. I am certainly not campaigning hard for him, or possibly at all. This policy was, to quote someone else, "bovine biological matter" - good in itself but not worth the fuss the Tories were making on Sunday and Monday about huge new tax cuts.

Sorry, Cameron apologists, but just because Brown is lousy doesn't mean that Dave is much better.
Waiting with interest 12:49pm on 04 Nov 2008 Cameron is more likely to be elected (or not) on what he does at home rather than whether a "novice" inherited the White House.

Obama is a Democrat, and while I think he will win, Cameron sided with the Republicans at conferences and is now ingratiating himself with the Democrats. He is going to need a lot more backbone if he ever gets into office in the UK. I doubt he will, if only because he is doing nothing but this preening and prancing and has nothing of his own to put up at a general election.

I am no fan of Brown but sympathise with his issue about DC as a novice. I also think that if Obama turns out to be a slightly younger Jimmy Carter, as some people suppose, Dave will be tarnished rather than gilded by association. And likewise Brown still has more of an idea - unfortunately - what he wants to do with a next term than does Dave, who backtracks every time he thinks he might have a sensible policy and changes his mind as much as he changes his socks.
Europe - ticking time bomb? 11:43am on 28 Oct 2008 I see the Tory bloggers are out in force this morning, Grawth. There is more to life than the problems facing Gordon Brown, you know. Unfortunately, we too deserve some scrutiny.
Agenda pressure 12:28pm on 23 Oct 2008 Nick, you have every right to consider which stories to support and which to discount. You are the journalist, the Tories are wrong to start to smear Mandelson as it suggests they have nothing better to do with their time than try and destroy Labour rather than putting forward a viable alternative.

They are the desperate ones, not you. The Conservative Party is increasingly paranoid, which is surprising given its lead in the polls; it perhaps knows that this is not a secure lead and instead of trying to put out genuinely interesting and workable policies it is becoming a nasty, lying bunch of lightweights who think they can spin their way into a 1997-style landslide.

How wrong they are.

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