Raab trails in fourth place in latest YouGov senior cabinet minsters’ favourability rankings
Mike Smithson
What happened on Betfair’s next PM market after news of Boris’s hospitalisation came out
There was similar movement on the Johnson exit date market. Raab is Johnson’s designated stand-in. This makes me uneasy about political betting but inevitably some punters will look to anything to turn a buck. I’m also not convinced that the market is reading this right. If there is a need a replacement PM then that would surely be a decision for the whole cabinet. I’m sure everybody on PB wishes Boris a speedy and full recovery. Mike Smithson
The positive thing for Starmer about LAB’s polling position is that at least there’s scope for improvement
Well tomorrow at this time LAB will have its new leader and the suggested negative influence of Corbyn will be no more. The big question is whether the former DPP is able to so present a different proposition to voters that first, the seats lost at GE2019, become prospects again. In a sense the current voting intention polling likely flatters the Tories given how fighting the virus totally dominates everything. The Johnson team is in charge making extraordinary demands of…
It won’t be Brexit that defines Boris but the decisions he made at the start of the coronavirus crisis
With the UK death toll rising by the day it is perhaps worth reflecting on the two decisions the government made at the start of the crisis. Firstly there was the reluctance to follow other nations to impose lockdowns straight away after the first death and then there was the agreement to allow this year’s Cheltenham Festival to take place as planned. The argument on the former was the desire to to delay the peak of the outbreak until the…
Today sees the worst set of front pages for the government since the crisis began
Ministers will get hammered while there’s a shortfall in testing After a period when the government has been generally getting positive media coverage for its fight against the coronavirus all has changed this morning as can be seen. The biggest issue is the amount of testing going on even for NHS staff and others on the front-line. This is far short of expectations of what we had been led to expect. When the Mail and the Mirror are both attacking…
Taking liberties
One of the most enjoyable aspects of investigations is listening to miscreants’ excuses for their bad behaviour. The same ones came up regularly, so much so that interviews would have been much quicker if we’d had a poster on the wall of the excuses so they could just have pointed and said: “6” with a bit of “9”. The two most common, usually presented with the passive-aggressive mulishness of schoolboys, were: “Where does it say I can’t do that?” and “Show…
Guest slot from Stocky: Why it should be made clear that lockdown will not extend past 12 weeks
An extreme utilitarianism stalks the land My daughter has started learning about philosophy. She is particularly enamoured with a thought experiment known as The Trolley Problem. The Trolley Problem invites us to either let things be with dire consequences or take action by pulling a lever and producing less dire consequences. Most people see this as a no-brainer: take action, pull the lever. This choice supposedly outs most people as utilitarians; the right thing to do is to maximise utility,…
Even LAB voters are giving Johnson positive leader ratings
There haven’t been many opinion polls of late but this afternoon we’ve got the detail of the latest Deltapoll which includes its regular well/badly leader ratings. The detail is shown in the panel above together with what those sampled did at GE2019 and the referendum. For me the most interesting numbers are the views of Johnson particularly the sub-set of LAB voters just three and a bit months ago. Generally there is a very clear party split in views of…