The hot betting favourite for the next PM, Liz Truss, first had a PB thread about her in 2009 before she even became an MP. She was one of a number of prospective Tory candidates who had been brought on by a big initiative by David Cameron to broaden the base of the party’s MPs. This is from that 2009 PB header: There’s now a betting market on the situation in the safe Tory seat of South West Norfolk where…
The Tories need a 5%+ lead We are going to hear a lot during this final phase of the Tory leadership contest about which of Truss or Sunak is best able to lead the party to another general election majority. One of the factors that we have to bear in mind is that in order to hang on then the Tories led by Liz or Rishi probably need a lead on GB votes by at least 5%. This is a…
If other pollsters have CON member polling with similar figures then it is very hard to see Truss being defeated. We should expect this to ratchet up the rhetoric from the Sunak camp and over the weekend expect a lot of difficult stories for the Truss camp. My main caveat is that member polling is quite challenging alhough YouGov has a good record.
The London Evening Standard is reporting that the PM could face a by-election if he is found to have misled Parliament over PartyGate. It will be recalled that the Met issued 126 Partygate fines after a number of lockdown busting gatherings in Downing Street and across Whitehall. He is due to appear before the Privileges Committee, in the autumn, over whether he lied to Parliament by insisting pandemic rules were followed in Downing Street at all times. Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle confirmed that,…
Now it’ll be driven by the Starmer comparison polls As can be seen the next CON leader betting has got a tad tighter with Truss moving down a bit from the betting boost she got from making it to the final two. What we have not seen since last night is named leader Westminster voting polling. Which one of the two will appear to have the Tories doing better when compared to Keir Starmer? The first such polls should come…
So now we know that the next Conservative leader and Prime Minister will be either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak. They became the names that will be put to the party membership in a postal ballot the result of which we should get in early September. One of the things about these two is that both of them are graduates from the University of Oxford. This is remarkable because the last time that a graduate of a university other than…
Was it PMQs that helped bring him down? No doubt over the next year or so we are going to see a series of academic and other studies on the downfall of Johnson who, of course, at GE2019 had the best Tory general election outcome since the Thatcher era. Arguably PMQs had its part to play his exit and it was some of his PMQ responses on “partygate” which potentially were troublesome for him. His flat assertions about the lockdown…