When Anna Coke married Colin Paget Tennant in the 1950s, for their honeymoon he took her to Paris, where the bride lost her virginity in awkward and painful circumstances, then her husband took his bride to partake in an orgy in a seedy Paris hotel, later on he took her to a stage show where a man made love to a donkey. I mention this story because I was struggling to think about a worse honeymoon than the one Sir…
If Reform want to win more MPs at the next election then they need to lower the number of voters who think Reform are extreme, should not be near power, nasty, and dishonest. I’m not sure those figures will improve whilst Nigel Farage continues to be Donald Trump’s personal proctologist. TSE
Earlier on this week I said I was expecting Donald Trump to win the electoral college then somebody who I respect when it comes to polling and politics told me I was epically wrong. They told me to remember one of Mike Smithson’s adages that close to an election the net favourability scores are often a better predictor of election outcomes than standard voting intentions. As we can see above from FiveThirtyEight Kamala Harris has better net approval ratings than…
Will Kemi’s class warfare work? It’s an interesting approach from Kemi Badenoch, I suspect it won’t have much positive impact on Tory MPs but could have an impact with Tory members with her effectively telling Cambridge educated lawyer Robert Jenrick that she is prolier than thou. This is the Starmer approach who occasionally mentioned he was the son of a toolmaker, that led him to winning a majority of over 200 seats at the election. She needs to do something…
Will the Vice President’s post debate boost last? Despite Donald Trump’s asseveration that he won the debate the polls say otherwise and Betfair has moved accordingly the question now is will this lead last? Because the Ayrshire hotelier has chickened out of future debates it might mean the lead goes back to pre-debate levels but it gives him fewer opportunities to do so. Two days ago I said I expected Trump to win the electoral college but I am revising…
As somebody with a failed marriage to their name I feel that I am absolutely the last person in the known universe who should be commentating on marriage but I was struck by the stat that ‘cohabiting couples with children are twice as likely to separate as married couples’. Perhaps I have been wrong in my life and I owe family values conservatives an apology then again I am sticking to my view that marriage is three rings, engagement ring,…
Today is the tenth anniversary of the Scottish independence referendum and if we look at how things are now compared to September 2014 not much has changed. Labour’s red rose is the dominant flower of Scotland, the SNP have single digit number of MPs, whilst support for independence generally hovering around the mid to high 40s (when don’t knows are removed) but all of that belies what has happened in those ten years. The SNP tsunami of 2015, Brexit, Covid-19,…
After the second round result there was a bit of movement towards Badenoch but that seems to have dissipated with Robert Jenrick going past the 50% probability mark in the past week. I think punters are coming to the view that Badenoch is unlikely to make the final two under the exhaustive ballot system (aka quasi-AV) voting system. With Kamala Harris the favourite on Betfair to win in November coupled with Starmer’s stonking majority punters think 2024 is shaping up…