At this time of the year I look forward to seeing the predictions of the voters for the upcoming year as collated by Ipsos MORI. It looks pretty grim for Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer with a majority of the public thinking Boris Johnson will not be the Prime Minister at the end of 2022 whilst more people think Starmer will not be Labour leader by the end of 2022 than do. Like Gordon Brown, Boris Johnson wanted to…
ACROSS 1 PM reveals all power corrupts without honour – right? (6,7) 8 Cable polled Labour grandee (4) 9 Angry substitute gets somewhere to sit in another place (10) 10 Conservative PM introduces a new set of rules enforced by ministers (5,3) 11 Endorse man holding suitable backing (6) 13 Government expert, covering Cold War’s origin, working with US President (6,4) 16 Remains here and laments the first couple leaving (4) 17 VAT announcement of Labour leader (4) 18 Dancer…
As regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of betting exchanges. Since they aren’t setting odds or taking risks from mis-pricings, they can easily offer a wider range of markets than their fixed odds brethren. There are two main exchanges currently, Betfair (by far the largest) and Smarkets (by far the best, but with mixed liquidity). However, there is a third exchange with good liquidity, many markets, and some appalling mis-pricings ripe for us to exploit. Sadly, we cannot…
So far I have only got a small bet on this market and it was placed some time ago. Although all the pressure today has been absolutely dreadful for Johnson I’m still not convinced that he’ll go of his own accord or that there will be a successful move amongst Conservative MP’s to get rid of him. It is very risky for MPs pressing ahead with a confidence vote because if Johnson wins it then there can be no similar…
One of the reasons that I use Opinium polls a lot for illustrative purposes is that the firm’s polling datasets are far more comprehensive than any other pollster and provide information not available elsewhere. The chart above is a case in point and illustrates the value of Opinium’s practice of including cross-heads showing responses of those polled in different sorts of constituency based on the GE2019 outcome. Here I am trying to show how things have moved since “Peak Boris”…
Compare these Focaldata findings from April… With these responses this week
This morning we have had three national voting polls which are featured in the Wikipedia table above. As can be seen, the Tories have slipped with YouGov having the party on 30% which is almost 15% down on GE2019. Focaldata and Redfield have the party a touch higher but LAB is clearly ahead. No doubt Tory MPs will be feeding the numbers into Electoral Calculus to see if their seats are safe. By my reckoning, if the next election followed…