This tribute from Times Radio to Sir David Butler, who died earlier on this week, is well worth watching. For those of us who follow elections and analyse them the work of Sir David Butler helped us understand them a lot better. The Guardian wrote on Wednesday

Sir David Butler, the father of modern election science whose career spanned more than 70 years, has died at the aged of 98.

Butler’s friend and biographer, the journalist Michael Crick, paid tribute to him as the “father of psephology” – a word that Butler promoted early in his career to describe “the new study of election science based on the Greek word psephos for pebble which the ancient Greeks used to vote in elections”.

“For decades Butler was the foremost psephologist in Britain and around the world,” Crick said.

Butler himself once described the term as an “awful, silly, academic joke” that “hangs like an albatross around my neck”.

The world of psephology would be a be a poorer place without Sir David’s contributions.

TSE