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Punters have no confidence in Sunak The above is a chart from Smarkets on betting on which party will win the most seats at the next general election. The highlight here is that there has been a considerable negative movement for the Tories particularly since Sunak became the Prime Minister. The Tories are down to less than a 25% chance which I would reckon probably overstates their position. One of the problems for The Tories is that so far at…

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Smarkets have a market up on who will be the next cabinet minister out and as you would expect Zahawi is the very strong favourite. He’s currently rated as a 90% chance. The flip side of this is that you can get about 4/1 on Zahami surviving and another cabinet minister being the next exit. What we know about Sunak is that he is very weak when it comes to sacking members of his team and the fact that he…

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And Starmer has a net approval lead of 10% There’s a new poll out from R&W of forty ‘Red Wall’ seats. All but one of them went Tory at GE2019 with the only exception, Hartlepool, being gained in the 2020 by-election. What is interesting here is that Reform UK, previously known as the Brexit Party, came third in these seats at GE2019 with 6.5% of the vote so almost no change in this survey. On leader approval, in these seats…

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I have finally found a Brexit benefit. No, really. But first, the journey. For someone trained at Goldmans and The Children’s Investment Fund, Sunak is remarkably lacking in ruthlessness. He had a wonderful opportunity to present himself as a clean break with the seediness and shameful self-interest of the Boris years. He could, for instance, have put the ethics advisor on a statutory footing, given him or her the right to start investigations without being asked, differentiated himself from his…

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This word cloud issued this afternoon by the pollster Redfield and Wilton makes a very strong point in a clear way. It is very hard to work out what Starmer stands for in terms of policy. While this might give a bit of comfort to the Tories who are seeing the massive LAB leads continue I wonder whether it actually matters. The point about the next general election is the that voters appear to have abandoned the Tories in sufficient…

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We are getting to that time when possible contenders for next year’s White House race start putting there hats into the ring and indicating that they might be making a formal bid for the nomination of their parties. The Republican contest has been partly hit by the fact that Donald Trump has already stated that he will be standing. This makes it significantly harder for other potential runners to go forward but one who appears to be making a move…

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The extraordinary thing about today is that Sunak has not yet acted on Zahawi. He’s still there doing heaven knows what damage to his party. One of the things about being a leader is that you have to have it in yourself to sack those of your team when the need arises. The first objective for the Prime Minister is to maintain the reputation of his government and allowing this story to dominate the news yet again isn’t very smart….

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I’ve got a hospital appointment today so there will be no more updates from me until I return. This is my main focus at the moment. Mike Smithson