Does Rishi only look good because his two immediate predecessors were so rubbish? We are seven months into Rishi Sunak’s premiership and we have enough information to start making judgments. For me one of his biggest flaws is his ability to overpromise and underdeliver, we see it with his boat pledges, but most egregiously we see it with the basket of deplorables he appointed to his cabinet. The country have judged him on for appointing people with huge red flags…
Like others I think Labour will struggle to win a majority at the next election, thanks largely to the toxic legacy bequeathed to Sir Keir Starmer by his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. As we get closer to the election, particularly if the polls tighten, the focus will be on what type of government Starmer will try and form. If the Tories are planning on revisiting their greatest hits then the tweet from Keiran Pedley shows why it will be ineffective and…
I have been very struck by this from YouGov on how backers of the Tories and LAB trust or distrust different news outlets. The ones that surprise me most are the Daily Express and Daily Mail which are both distrusted by backers of both main parties. On the other side of the coin it is interesting to note how Channel 4 news has net trust positives with both LAB and CON voters. The Sun has the worst figures being distrusted…
It was always going to be the case surely that support for the monarchy would fall off a bit following the death of the Queen. She had a very special appeal built up over the decades and this was something that she could not pass on to her firstborn. The cost and sheer extravagance of the Coronation at a time when the vast majority of the Kings subjects were having to tighten their belts was inevitably going to be difficult…
But he’s still a 25% chance in the betting The big development in the 2024 White House race has been the expected announcement by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that he was in fact standing for the presidency. This was hardly a surprise that has had almost exactly no impact on the betting. It has had an impact on his fundraising. NYT reports that he raised $8.2 million in his first 24 hours as a presidential candidate – a huge sum…
Robert Ford is the Professor of Political science at Manchester University.
One of the great things about the pollster Ipsos is that it has been carrying out political surveys in the UK since the mid-1970s. In the early days, it was known just as MORI but now it is part of the international polling group Ipsos. It has an incredible polling library which enables it to produce comparisons like the one above on how various opposition leaders were doing at this stage into their term of office. One thing the chart…
My one WH2024 Republican nomination bet so far is on the former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley. That is pretty impressive CV. A big reason is that she is likely to do very well her own state’s primary which usually comes straight after Iowa and New Hampshire. If that happens then it’s likely she will be portrayed in the media as the frontrunner to take on Trump very early on in the…