ePolitix.com - Week on the web

Skirmishes over the NHS aside, Westminster is still on holiday – leaving most commentators to the traditional new year pursuit of prognostication.

Political Betting thinks that next general election will be in May 2010. In the meantime the Tories will hold a 10 point-ish lead, the Lib Dems will make a small recovery and Ken Livingstone will win May’s mayoral election by a small margin.

Anthony Wells at UK Polling Report is publishing three articles summing up the poll performance of the three main parties in 2007 and their prospects for 2008. Gordon Brown's lack of charisma and warmth, he says will "prevent him being able to bring it back". The Conservatives, he thinks, will finish as a minority government in a hung Parliament or with a shoestring majority.

An interesting post on LabourHome by doctordunc, who asks from a "left perspective" how Brown can restore his support base in the party in 2008. At the moment "we have the bizarre spectacle of a leader who was elected unopposed and nominated by nearly the whole of the PLP who actually has no real constituency in the party", he says.

The Telegraph's Three Line whip predicts, perhaps somewhat wistfully, that Labour Party will go bankrupt in 2008.

More Tory fantasy and Blair bashing in the holiday newspapers by Peter Oborne, whose tongue in cheek predictions include the rather unlikely suggestion that Alastair Campbell may be called back to Number 10 and Brown will assault chancellor David Miliband.

That said, the New Statesman's Kevin Maguire was this week talking of Campbell mending fences with the "Talibrown".

Dizzy takes his lead from the Conservatives to publish his heroes and zeros of 2007, while Wantage MP Ed Vaizey promises to blog more often and concludes that Brown is down but not out, Cameron is ahead but not over the finishing line, and Nick Clegg is a damp squib.

Much of the media and the blogosphere seems to be in a bountiful mood, and willing to give Brown another chance in the new year. Jonathan Freeland summed up the mood in the Guardian, saying: "Desperately required is a spell of quiet, so that the serial misfortunes of the autumn come to seem like a bad patch rather than a Brownian pattern".

Paul Linford also thinks that whether Brown can recover will be the key talking point of the new year, but says that if anyone believes suggestions of a Miliband-Balls dream ticket "it is a measure of how bad things have got for Labour".

Skipper says he bumped into a former Labour minister who agreed that morale in the party had "seldom been lower".

Play Political, which has gone into something of a frenzy over the start of the US elections, posted the top 10 videos of 2007. Britain and America, which like Play Political comes from the ConservativeHome stable of sites, has been posting 'all you need to know' summaries of events in Iowa.

For those confused by primaries, caucuses and other West Wingery, Westmonster has a simple introduction here. For devotees, the must-see websites are the compendium RealClearPolitics, and the headline-grabbing Politico.

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