Guido is looking forward to the launch of PoliticsHome for one reason, it promises to make political reporting a numbers game, like U.S. sports reporting or financial news. Anyway in a cunning ruse to get coverage they are giving an insight into the kind of numbers they are polling daily from their politically balanced “insider” panel.

They are selectively giving tasters of their polling results out for us to nibble on, today it is Guido’s turn to discover that:

5% of insiders think “the British political system is not in any need of any significant reform”.

The other 95% breakdown as follows:

That 5% must be crackers. Guido would like the reporting of politics to be more like a blood sport…

They are calling it Downing Street blue-on-blue infighting. The neo-Brownies from the PR world ousting the old Brownie tribe who successfully undermined Blair. The truth is the Brownies are second rate compared to the Blairites, this was patently obvious to any objective observer. Even Guido, no fan of Blair, could see that he was a politician with a high calibre team. Brown on the other hand is a brooding malevolent weirdo who had no choice but to surround himself with second raters, Blair had attracted the best and the brightest of New Labour’s talent pool.

The Brownies were able to undermine a triple election winning prime minister, brief against rivals, selectively leak, obstruct, frustrate rival policy objectives out of spite and generally behave like petulant secretive plotters always positioning for factional advantage rather than in the national interest. They were capable of that, alas when they finally assumed control of No. 10 it became clear within months that they were not a capable or competent premiership team.
If Gordon is to have any hope of narrowing the double digit lead Cameron has over him at the polls he clearly needs to up his game. Stephen Carter has been brought in from his job as CEO of Brunswick to do that because the veteran Brownies are part of the problem, not the solution, too immersed in the Labour tribe, good at arm twisting the party rank and file, not at reaching out to swing voters. His PPS Ian Austin’s heckles of Cameron at PMQs amuse only the class warriors on the Labour back benches – they even manage to irritate the chippy Speaker. His counsel is no use to Gordon now the electorate that matters to him is no longer merely the PLP.

Month after month of poll decline has finally got the message through to Brown. Hence we see the marginalising of his former closest supporters, even his pollster, Deborah Mattinson is said to be on her way out. Spencer Livermore went in tears. Gordon’s praetorian guard MPs Tom Watson and Iain Austin, respectively Gordon’s attack puppy and heckler-in-chief, occupied ground floor offices in Downing Street adjacent to the cabinet room. The pair liked to think of themselves as Gordon’s enforcers. Stephen Carter has had them kicked out of their offices and their places taken by his deputy and secretary.

Brown has just told Sky’s Adam Boulton that he doesn’t look at opinion polls. An absolutely blatant lie.

He even has a personal pollster – Deborah Mattinson – who must now dread telling him the bad news. After Mattinson told him he would lose the marginals, he bottled having an election. When he told the press pack that they weren’t a factor they were incredulous. When he told Cameron the same at PMQs the Tory benches fell about laughing. He is like most politicians, poll obsessed.

Facts :

Labour MPs in marginal seats this weekend will be wondering what they have wrought. Three times Blair led them to victory, the latest poll shows that after just three months, Brown is a likely loser, along with their seats.

The Tories really should consider sending Tom Watson a bottle of champagne for his part in Blair’s downfall, particularly after he lost that £100 bet with Cameron…

Word reaches Guido that at a meeting scheduled for next Tuesday the leaders of the NO2ID campaign are likely to decide on an election strategy advocating tactical voting to oust MPs who support ID cards at the election.

The message is simple; if you want to get rid of ID cards, vote against those who voted for them. Two examples where this strategy might work to devastating effect are Tooting and Islington South:

In Islington South the Tories came a distant third, but the LibDem was less than 400 votes behind left-wing Labour MP Emily Thornberry. Tories should vote for the LibDem and enjoy getting rid of the ID card loving, CND supporting MP.

In Tooting the LibDems were nearly 10,000 votes behind Labour Sadiq Khan, if they switched votes to the second-placed Tory candidate they would be getting rid of an authoritarian Labour MP who voted strongly for introducing national ID cards, strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws and very strongly against investigating the Iraq war.

As things stand the third placed party has no hope, the result of widespread tactical voting would be less MPs to push through ID cards and guaranteed LibDem and Tory gains. Across the country tactical voting would further slash Labour’s majority. The logic is clear, where a LibDem or Tory is in a distant third place, vote for the candidate most likely to unseat the ID card supporter. Guido doesn’t think it impossible we could see Nick Clegg and David Davis on the same anti-ID cards platform.

Of course fear of tactical voting could result in Gordon Brown dropping ID cards altogether before the election – which would be huge a victory for the NO2ID campaign…

The Guardian’s ICM poll signals the Brown Bounce is over, and now (after a delay much longer than Guido expected) Labour’s post-Blair lemming-like lurch will re-commence. The Tories had a good conference, the Brown election bluff brought about unity in Blackpool, Dave gave a purposeful speech which was head and shoulders over Brown’s plagiarised effort. Brown’s well planned gimmicks, spin and fakery gave him a good summer, but this winter we’ll hear no more talk of destroying the Tories and “all the talents” won’t save him now.

It wasn’t the speech that turned the polls around, although if Dave had not delivered a good speech it would have undermined the advance of the Tories, it was the return of the Tory party’s Unique Selling Point – tax cuts. Family-orientated tax cuts are a clear vote winner – so keen have the Tories been to decontaminate themselves that they threw away their USP. Look at Clinton, even he was elected on a promise of family-orientated tax cuts. The Cameroons have committed themselves to Gordon’s spending plans for the first three years of government, so Ed Balls is going to argue that the sums don’t add up. If that is going to be the battleground, the Tories can win on those terms.

The middle classes don’t care half as much about the arithmetic as they do about the result. Balls and Brown are so out of touch with middle-England they don’t seem to understand how much the tax burden is detested by the middle-classes, who know instinctively that there is government waste to be reduced. Tax is also the issue that swung the Daily Mail and The Telegraph back behind the Tories, The Sun is “loving it” too. The raison d ‘etre of the Conservatives party is to reduce taxes, if they ever forget it they are finished.

The SNP in power have not performed as disastrously as Labour’s pre-election scaremongering depicted. Remember the dire warnings of capital flight and businesses re-locating? Which explains why in office their poll ratings have surged – expectations were so unrealistically low.

A lot of Scottish Labour MPs will be very worried by the prospect of an early election in Scotland… no “Brown bounce” in to be seen at home…

Guido was sure his brain was too addled by alcohol when he saw the front page of the Guardian this morning. Rich Johnston emailed it in and the penny didn’t drop until he explained it slowly. According to the Guardian’s ICM poll sample of 1005 randomly telephoned adults, not one single person likes David Cameron and the Conservative Party. Some like the party, some like Dave, but none like both. Guido knew the polls were bad for Dave, but really, does no one like ‘em both?

UPDATE : Turns out that it was a difficult to explain Grauniad cock-up, the actual figures from ICM were very different – 25% liked both Dave and the Tories. Pretty “cavalier with the facts” report, it should have been obvious that something was wrong, maybe over at the Guardian they can more easily believe that nobody likes Cameron. In the real world he is a bit more popular than on Farringdon road.

The Indy headline says it all – Brown’s ‘bounce’ fails to materialise as Tories take five-point lead. The somewhat deranged voices who think Brown will be the electoral saviour of the Labour party will be terribly disappointed.

Guido predicted the Lemming effect – they are going to miss three times election winning Blair when he is gone. Wait and see…

On the weekend the YouGov poll in the Sunday Times emphasised the electoral liability that Gordon is to Labour. When asked to choose between Cameron and Brown the voters prefer Dave more than when asked to choose between Labour and the Tories.

Today Populus in the Times* re-confirms the finding, when asked to choose between the parties it has the Tories 4% ahead, when asked to choose between the leaders the Tories are 10% ahead – exactly the same result as YouGov.

Putting the crude numbers into the electoral calculus translates that differential, the Brown Deficit, into 60 lost Labour marginal seats. Now you know why Guido says it is lemming-like to dispatch Blair for Brown…

*How the hell Peter Riddell and Philip Webster can spin the poll as positive for Brown is beyond Guido. What people will do for access. The headline is “A Bounce for Brown“. Maybe they mean a lemming-like bounce, with people even less likely to vote Labour when Brown is leader.