Above is the front page of Monday’s Guardian with the UK political news that looks set to dominate the next few days. It appears we are very close to a VONC on Johnson and that could happen very quickly. Personally I think rebel Tory MPs are being premature and would be better waiting till after the June 23rd by-elections. The main case for the incumbent is that he claims the record of being an election winner and that would be…
A man who is seen so overwhelming untrustworthy by Tories, the oldies, the rich, and pretty much everybody else is going to lead the Tories to an epochal defeat so long as Labour aren’t led by somebody as toxic as Jeremy Corbyn. This polling feeds in to other aspects of polling and anecdata as Tom Newton Dunn reveals today. On the electoral question, the public numbers aren’t great, but they certainly could be worse. Labour’s eight-point lead should be far…
I like this market from Smarkets as most of the markets on the confidence vote are if/when it takes place or on the binary outcome of the vote but this on the vote margin. Whilst it seems inevitable that a vote will be triggered this month (maybe as early as tomorrow) or later on this month if the Tories lose both by elections I wonder if Tory MPs might delay the vote until after the Committee of Privileges has reported…
TSE
For someone who likes to be liked yesterday’s booing of Johnson, seen by tens of millions as he arrived at St Paul’s, must have been very difficult to stomach. I’m not a fan of the PM but it was hard not to feel for him as he walked up the Cathedral steps with the cameras on him yesterday, At the very minimum, this public display of antagonism to the PM will have been noticed by Tory MPs who soon might…
With the possibility of a Conservative leadership contest in the next few weeks I thought it might be useful to look at the likely contenders. And as we are celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee let’s start with the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss who in her earlier career was strongly opposed to the monarchy and at the LD conference in 1994 moved a resolution calling for its abolition. Clearly, she has switched parties since and her views on the monarchy are not…
But the total is his secret There is only one UK political betting story at the moment and that is whether Johnson is going to face a vote of no confidence amongst Conservative MPs. If 54 of them send letters to Graham Brady, the 1922 Committee Chair, he will initiate the ballot at Westminster amongst the parliamentary party. If Johnson fails to win a simple majority in that secret ballot he is is out. This could all be over within…
Inevitably the main betting interest at the moment continues to be whether Boris Johnson is going to survive. Currently on Smarkets punters make it an 80% chance that he will face a VONC amongst Tory MPs in 2022. But the money is going by 60% to 40% on him surviving such a vote. That, I believe, could look different if both the June 23rd by-elections result in Tory losses as seems likely at the moment. The biggest driving force in…