News from Labour Matters

The spectacularly wrong speculation of The Spectator’s journalists

Speculating about the date of the next election is a fools game, just ask Iain Dale, but nobody really believed his ‘exclusive’ about Labour secretly planning a February election. Except apparently The Spectator’s Coffee House blogger James Forsyth.

But then he also recently claimed that “it is understandable that Brown won’t rule out an ‘09 poll” (so he’s only half wrong so far), but let the cat out of the bag about why he spends so much time speculating by writing “if the Tories can stoke speculation sufficiently, Brown will feel obliged to rule it out”.

Meanwhile his colleague at The Spectator, Fraser Nelson, has just been a bit confused over when the election would be. On the 9th of November, writing for the News of the World (tagline: Your insider in the corridors of power), he’d “roll the dice on an election next spring”, but ten days later claimed that “the likelihood of a January election grows stronger”.

And we got all that quality ‘journalism’ in just the last two months. How far into 2009 can it be before the boys at Coffee House start predicting a Summer poll and demanding that Gordon Brown rule it out in advance?

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