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It is quite something for a government to challenge via judicial review the use of legal powers exercised by an inquiry it set up, run by a judge it appointed, with terms of reference it drafted. Why? Two broad reasons: (1) The need not to impede good governance (do stop laughing) by disclosing Ministerial/civil service communications which the government thinks irrelevant. (2) Concerns about personal communications and the private life of governmental witnesses. This latter point features quite strongly in…

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As he tumbles so does his betting price The one thing that the Democrats have been most worried about is an event like the one featured in the video clip above – Joe Biden taking a tumble at a very public event with the cameras running. For the big question over the 80 year old’s desire to be re-elected has always been his age and undoubtedly the clip above will feature strongly if he does, as planned seek to remain…

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One thing that worries me at the moment about any projection that is based on current party choice polling is, as I have argued before, that a very high proportion of GE2019 Tory voters are not giving a voting intention which I believe distorts polling outcomes. Thus the latest YouGov has just 45% of this group saying Tory but a whopping 21% saying don’t know and 7% saying they would not vote. Only 11% of GE2019 CON voters have switched…

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The big number to remember when looking at the polls is that the Curtice projection for LAB to secure a majority is a 7% poll vote over the Tories. The Conservatives, meanwhile, can achieve a majority with a 3% GB vote lead So that gives fair gap for LAB in the latest round of polling but, of course, the five-week general election campaign could change all of that. Just remember what happened to TMay at GE2017. But Labour does not…

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One thing’s certain – this isn’t going to go away Given the lengths that appear to be being taken not to release certain information about the Johnson’s government handling of COVID the assumption must be that there is something very big that ministers are trying to cover up. It might be that the ex-PM is able to get through the next few days but until we know what this is about it will continue to hang over him. No doubt…

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The problem here, of course, is that COVID and the measures to control it had a huge impact on our lives and inevitably there is a big public desire to know what happened and how well our elected leaders did. Johnson was more than ready to take the plaudits for the vaccine but he should be accountable for his other actions while he was in charge. This issue isn’t going to go away. Once again Sunak appears to be sitting…

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Ed Davey’s party might have been smashed in the Stop Corbyn Tory surge at GE2019 but they have had one of their best parliaments ever in terms of winning Westminster by-elections. They’ve taken three seats (two of them from third place) from the Tories and have a great chance of gaining another in Mid Bedfordshire if Nadine is made a peer in BoJo’s resignation honours. Their target at the general election surely must be to become the third party at…

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It is hard to see what has happened in the past week to explain the shift apart from the fracas with the Home Secretary and Sunak’s decision not to sack her. He came out of that affair not very well. The general election betting remains pretty static with punters making it a 54% chance that there will be a LAB overall majority – that is 326 seats or more. Mike Smithson