Rishi seems to threaten that the area will suffer financially if the Tory loses The above is a copy of a letter from Rishi Sunak that has been sent to voters in the Chesham and Amersham by-election and the controversial part is the strapline at the top – “To recover from the pandemic Chesham and Amersham needs an MP who can work with me” It is being argued that Sunak is saying that if the Tories should lose their 29%…
Developments on two fronts today – one positive for those looking for a return to normality and one that is very negative. The so called R Rate is up in England to between 1 and 1.2. The R number, of course, is a measure of the average number of people an infected person will go on to infect. When this is going downwards below 1 COVID is in decline but when it goes above, like that announced today, the battle…
The really hard part of all of this for ministers is that the vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this. What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and…
The government’s move this afternoon to change the status of Portugal is a massive blow to tens of thousands of people who had booked because until today this was the one big tourist area where travel was allowed with no reqirement to self isolate on return. What is causing consternation in the travel industry is that ministers like Shapps are making these announcements without giving the full detail of how decisions are taken. There is a public expectation that the…
There is some great analysis on voting behaviour in the latest edition of the New Statesman which today publishes the chart above in an article by Ben Walker. As can be seen British Election Study data on what happened in December 2019 finds that if you exclude retirees then LAB was in the lead by a margin of 3.1%. But if you include them the Tories lead by 11%. As well as being pro-Tory a big factor about the old…
During the day Keir Starmer has continued to recieve laudits for how he coped with the Piers Morgan grilling last night and there’s been a little bit of movement in his price on the Betfair next PM market. The significance of this is that Starmer’s position had been in decline since the May 6th local and his party’s loss of the Hartlepool by-election and this might just put an end to the slide. We should however expect a poor performance…
Now will Johnson agree to a similar quizzing? I have just caught up with last night’s interview on ITV between Piers Morgan and Keir Starmer and overall he was right to take up the invitation. It has been very difficult during the pandemic for any politicians other than ministers to get any attention from the media that they have to take what is on offer. The Telegraph summed it up like this Both men came off well in this meaty…
Retaining current controls is going to be difficult