It’s shouldn’t be too long before we get some more opinion polls. They will measure the impact of recent events. My prediction is that Brown’s lead will widen a little. The narrowing we saw in the most recent polls followed David Cameron’s successful August fightback. At that time we’d dominated the political stage in the same way a party does during the week of its Party Conference.
We need to keep remembering what I (and many others) said before Brown took over: We won’t know the underlying state of public opinion until after the Party Conference season. We shouldn’t over-react to any polls until then. There remains a real chance that Gordon Brown will have called a General Election by early October but that possibility has decreased because of the huge energy that David Cameron has displayed over the last month.
Anyway: here are the factors that could contribute to a larger Labour lead…
…here are the factors that could reduce Brown’s advantage….