Today is the nineteenth month anniversary of Sir Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister and it feels longer to me, it undoubtedly feels even longer for Sir Keir, I find this polling intriguing on several fronts. Firstly the self inflicted nature of them and the poor communications around them, secondly the u-turns and the lack of credit therein, third policies seem mater more than froth issues like freebiegate, and fourthly it will be difficult to cut the benefits of pensioners. TSE
In one of those amusing ironies I have spent the afternoon participating in a seminar about ethics & probity and my answer to every situation was ‘What would Lord Mandelson do in this situation and do the exact opposite’. A usually successful rule on political betting is betting on something not happening but I think we are at the end of the days for the Starmer premiership, and Starmer’s explanation reminded me of the Chris Pincher scandal which ended Boris…
TSE
Lord Mandelson photographed in his underwear is one of those images that will not be forgotten it says more about something than a magnum opus on the subject ever could. I suspect this is going to be sub-optimal for Sir Keir Starmer and Labour’s polling in the short term at least, I suspect Sir Keir Starmer finds the whole scandal a bit pants. TSE
I always thought I would cover stories about Peter Mandelson because that is de rigueur for him but I never thought I wonder end up covering the stories that have emerged, I am not surprised the police have been asked to investigate, nor did I think his underpants would become so prominent. This reflects poorly on Sir Keir Starmer but David Cameron survived Andy Coulson but the real question is what on earth happens with the vetting in the Foreign…
The Betfair market looks very pleasing for anybody who backed the Greens at 6/1 yet I think there could be some value in backing Labour. I suspect the infamous, statistically irrelevant, Find Out Now poll has allowed Labour to frame the narrative as a two horse race between themselves and Reform, if the by-election is framed as stopping Reform then Labour could profit, particularly the views of the Reform candidate on those he considers British. TSE
The fallout from that Find Out Now poll is a bit of a mess, over a decade ago a pollster told ‘you’re only as good as your last poll’, on that basis it’s not good for Find Out Now, but for them there’s a few elections coming up for them to recover as I cannot recall ever a pollster saying their poll isn’t statistically signficant. One positive from this is that it shows why the British Polling Council and their…
A quick reminder about the 2026 PB Predictions Competition. To enter you simply need to post your answers to the following 12 questions onto the site before the end of January with the hashtag #competition somewhere in the post to help the scorer (me) find your entry. Or, you can private message me @Benpointer with your entry answers. Questions are weighted equally with 20 points for a correct or a closest answer and 10 points for a near miss,…