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Is DefSec Wallace a good bet? Having been bald myself since my mid-thirties I’ve always been conscious of suggestions that it could be a limiting factor in a political career. In the very early days of PB the Tories were onto their second bald leader in succession – IDS . He replaced Hague after the GE2001 disaster for the party and became the only CON leader in modern times to be booted out before he had even faced a general…

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For me it seems like only the other day but earlier on this week was the second anniversary of Boris Johnson introducing the first lockdown and I was intrigued by this polling by Ipsos. Unsurprisingly there’s very little desire any future lockdowns. The most intriguing thing for me was that 42% of the public think the UK handled the pandemic well compared to other countries whilst 27% disagree. This suggests the government might be able to campaign on their Covid-19…

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Starmer now edges it over Sunak By any measure this has been a bad week for the Chancellor. His big statement and some basic PR stumbles have seen punters move away from the former hot favourite and Starmer now tops the market by default. Rishi simply hasn’t looked like Number 10 material with things like the ludicrous picture of him trying to fill up a small Kia car with petrol when it turned out that the shot was not new…

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But aren’t they being a bit premature? One of the things about the main opposition party is that it is an awful long time ago since it was able to gain a seat in a Westminster by-election – something that the Tories and LDs have done at fairly regular intervals in recent years. In 2021 alone the Tories took Hartlepool from LAB while the LDs had spectacular gains at Chesham & Amersham and Shropshire North. You have to go back…

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It’s hard to believe these days, but London used to be a swing city politically. Labour tended to have an edge, but the Tories were frequently hot on their heels. The ‘popular vote’ across local elections in the city was frequently within a couple of percentage points, such as the 1990, 2002, and 2006 elections. In 2006 the Tories even swept control of half a dozen councils off Labour and governed 14 of the city’s 32 boroughs (Labour controlled 7,…

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Can Le Pen be squeezed out of the runoff slot? The thing to remember about French presidential elections is how important tactical voting can be in the first round. A total of 12 managed to get themselves onto the ballot for the first round of voting on April 10th and the big question is whether or not the hard right candidate ,Le Penn, could be squeezed off the second round. This is why the polling can be so important because…

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17 months. That’s all it took, though to judge by the outraged comments from Ministers it may as well have been 17 centuries ago, so short are their memories. What happened 17 months ago that could possibly have any relevance today? On 8 September 2020 Brandon Lewis, then Northern Ireland Secretary, announced to the House of Commons that provisions in the Internal Markets Bill on Northern Ireland customs arrangements broke “international law in a very specific and limited way“. It…

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