Not another December election?
I am sticking with my assumption of an October/November election. TSE
The world is changed
The world is changed, I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air, I see it in the polling, the era of Boris Johnson is over. The stand out figure is that even a majority of Leavers do not want him back as an MP, even more so than the fact 2019 Tories are evenly split on the question. If this question asked if the country wanted Boris Johnson back as…
What’s this going to do to the May results?
My expectation is that it will have no material impact on May’s elections, as noted in the Tweets above, those who were excited about Sir Keir’s curries will become similarly excited. However if she is charged I suspect she will have to resign from the shadow cabinet until she is cleared by the courts as politicians cannot be seen to break electoral law, Caesar’s wife and all that jazz. TSE
Voter suppression could work for the Tories
I suspect Best for Britain might be wrong because last year Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg admitted the voter ID changes were an attempt at voter suppression that backfired he said “Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as, dare I say, we found by insisting on voter ID for elections….We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they, by and large, voted Conservative, so we made it hard for…
No we Khan’t? Could the unthinkable happen in London?
Back in 2021 the final Redfield & Wilton poll for the London Mayoral election had Sadiq Khan leading Shaun Bailey, the Tory candidate, by 21% in the first round, Khan’s actual lead in the first round was fewer than 5%. If we have a similar polling failure and with a bit of differential turnout due to Sadiq Khan being the incumbent and people thinking Labour are going to win we could see an upset thanks to the government changing the…
A Lost Decade
Scandals and misconduct do not come out of nowhere. When people misbehave there is usually a clue, often more than one, usually ignored (even if carefully collected and correctly filed) or hand-waved away as unimportant (see the Angiolini Report on Wayne Couzens, for instance). The same applies to scandals involving organisations and actions (or a lack of action) by many people. There were warnings; there were whistleblowers; people were told. Coupled with this is a failure to take this information…
A new dawn has broken has it not?
It is astonishing to think that as we approach the tenth anniversary of when the wise Scots rejected secession and division we have the first proper* YouGov poll since before the referendum to show Labour ahead of the SNP in Westminster voting intentions. Labour used to dominate Scottish politics like a dominatrix whose client didn’t have a safe word and I still maintain the most astonishing election result this century in the UK was in 2015 when Labour went from…
Trigger points for Sunak
Last week it was announced that the Blackpool South by-election will take place on the same day as the local elections and I wonder if the by-election is what, rather than the locals, triggers a vote of confidence in Sunak. If the Tories finish behind Reform that might spread blind panic amongst Tory MPs that this is happening so close to a general election. As far as I can see only Smarkets have a betting market on the by-election but…