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Month: June 2020

As CON MPs get increasingly concerned about Boris the 3/2 that he won’t be leader at the next election starts to look tempting

As CON MPs get increasingly concerned about Boris the 3/2 that he won’t be leader at the next election starts to look tempting

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With the Tory voting lead dropping sharply in the polls and Boris trailing some way behind Starmer in the leader ratings there have been increasing reports of growing doubts about him amongst Tory MPs. This is what the excellent Stephen Bush writes in today’s I Newspaper:   As far as most Conservative MPs are concerned, the benefit of backing Boris Johnson for the top job was that he was the most well-placed to win the 2019 election. They always harboured…

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Trump is said to be obsessed with the polls and the news for him has been getting worse

Trump is said to be obsessed with the polls and the news for him has been getting worse

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With Trump’s poll ratings having taken a nasty shock the President has decided to hold his first big rally in month in Tulsa, Oklahoma next week. The venue looks odd given that the state is one of the most rock solid Republican you can find and it is hard to see any political gain in going there. Perhaps that is the point. He wants to go to an area where he knows he will be given an overwhelmingly friendly welcome…

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Twenty thousand excess pandemic deaths could be Johnson’s political legacy

Twenty thousand excess pandemic deaths could be Johnson’s political legacy

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How’s this going to play at the general election? Whenever the pandemic is over and we return to normal life the politics of what has happened over these last few months are going to dominate the political agenda perhaps until the next general election. A big question is whether Johnson’s government was too slow to act. The main story on Guardian this morning under the headline “Enforcing UK lockdown one week earlier ‘could have saved 20,000 lives’ sets out an…

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More dreadful leader numbers for Boris: Starmer moves to a net plus 34 in latest YouGov Well/Badly ratings

More dreadful leader numbers for Boris: Starmer moves to a net plus 34 in latest YouGov Well/Badly ratings

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Another set of leader ratings has Johnson trailing a long way behind Starmer. The LAB leader has a net score (badly % deducted from Well %) of plus 27%. In the same poll with the same calculation Johnson is minus 7%. So that means a 34% net lead for Starmer. This is in line with other leader recent leader rating polling which asked different questions. The YouGov one here was its traditional “is X doing well/badly?” At the moment the…

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A new way of showing how LAB and CON are viewed

A new way of showing how LAB and CON are viewed

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This looks quite interesting – trying to assess how the main two parties are viewed by looking at responses to the same series of YouGov questions over a period of time. This has been all dressed up and called the Valence Index. No doubt we’ll see more of this in the coming months but it will be a long time before we can test this in a real election. One thing that strikes me is that there are more don’t…

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Weeping angels. On moving statues

Weeping angels. On moving statues

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“I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’Nothing…

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