Given that the latest poll over the weekend has LAB with an 11% lead you would have thought that Johnson would at least recognise that he needs be to contrite in a little way. There is a lot of strong feeling out there from the 80% plus of people who strictly followed the lockdown rules and after being fined you would expect Johnson not to ignore this. The lead story in this morning’s Times under the heading “Defiant Boris Johnson…
These two charts from YouGov really should frighten anyone in the Conservative Party, I’m a strong proponent of the belief that oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them, and these poll findings seem to indicate the Conservatives are on course to lose the next election. The cost of living crisis, the tempest long foretold foretold, is shredding the reputation of the government as evidenced in the above YouGov findings. There’s a bit of irony that keeping inflation low is…
The speed of Rishi Sunak’s fall from grace from nailed on next Conservative leader and Prime Minister to someone the public really doesn’t like is astonishing and is one of the more remarkable things in the history of British politics. The only real rival to this rapid fall is Theresa May’s going from the PM who was on course for a majority of 290 seats to losing David Cameron’s majority in a little over seven weeks. Tomorrow is the fifth…
As can be seen in the betting chart the market on who will be the next prime minister has moved around an enormous amount over the last couple of months. The big loser in betting terms has been Chancellor Sunak and this initially caused a fair bit of money to switch to Keir Starmer. Then everything changed when it became clear that Johnson and Sonak were getting fined for their lockdown violations in 2020. This made Starmer much less attractive…
After the brawl, the duel. The French Presidential election has been in full swing for the best part of a year for many voters, but we’ve now entered the final fortnight where the top two candidates face off. Polls show Macron consolidating his position and his lead returning to roughly 55:45, but I feel markets are too confident that the polls are spot on. Learning from our mistakes The French polls are good, but they aren’t infallible. Back in 2017,…
I am convinced that the “process illegal immigrants in Rwanda” plan is not a serious policy but Johnson throwing a dead cat onto the table in order to get the subject off his party gate fines. What is interesting is while there is great concern about illegal immigration this plan does not get that much support with most voters who have a view opposing the idea. A problem, of course, is that Rwanda itself has been the scene of some…
What we know from past experience is that local by-elections in the run-up to the main May local elections can give a reasonably good indicator about what might happen If this is indeed the case on May 5th then the results overnight were particularly worrying for the Tories who saw losses to LAB, the LDs and IND. One of the things that makes local elections so challenging is that turnouts are low and local party machines that can get energise…
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