We all remember at the height of the first lockdown how the Cummings road trip on April 2020 so dominated the media when this was exposed a few weeks later and led to a big drop for the Tories in both the voting intention polls and Johnson’s leader ratings. If anything could have set out clearly to all at Number10 the impact of lockdown breaches this was it. The public anger as picked as recorded in the polls at the…
This gets worse and worse for Number 10 The overall issue remains. If 54 Tory MPs do send letters in demanding a confidence vote the majority of party MPs taking part in that ballot have to vote for him to go for that to happen. A possible situation that could be tricky is if Johnson survived this by just a small margin and he sought, as seems likely, to try to carry on. He’d be even more damaged and a…
“When troubles come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” It’s hard these days keeping track of all the Tories’ various scandals. Outside business interests. Wallpaper. Doing favours for donors. Free foreign holidays. Parties. Disrespecting the Queen. Blackmailing MPs. Misusing public money. Sacking Muslim Ministers. Prioritising pets over people. So here is your handy Cut Out and Keep Guide to the various stages of how a small problem turns into a big crisis. For those in or supporting other…
Good evening, Mr Bond. I know you like a flutter, and that’s why I designed my latest scheme just for you. It began with a betting market. So simple, yet so temping. Who will be the next actor to play 007? The entertainment press loves discussing it, generating an endless supply of speculation and punters my way. Better yet, the options are endless. Maybe it will be a woman this time, as recent films have hinted? Or the first black…
Following the stunning success for the Liberal Democrats at the North Shropshire by-election, former YouGov head, Peter Kellner, wrote in the Guardian: Byelection campaigns develop their own momentum: tactical voting in general elections is never as great. But back in 1997, when Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown led their respective parties, tactical shifts of just a few percentage points cost the Conservatives about 30 seats they would otherwise have held. Nothing like that happened in 2019. Lib Dems could not…
Following Christian Wakeford’s stunning act of tergiversation Smarkets have a market up on whether we’ll see more Tory defections by the end of the next month, based on the story below you can understand why. My normal instinct in theis type of market is to back No. A little over three months ago it was said that three Labour MPs were ready to defect to the Tory Party, I wrote at the time ‘Defections usually aren’t normally leaked until the…
Ladbrokes have just reported that 63% of the next PM bets they’ve laid this week have been on the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. He’s now a very tight favourite in the betting. All this assumes that there will be a vacancy and that he would win the ensuing leadership election. But Johnson is sitting tight and the only way he’s is going to be pushed aside is if there’s a vote of confidence that he loses. So unless there’s the unlikely…
One thing we have learned this past week is that Johnson is not going anywhere of his own accord. For him to cease to be PM is going to require Tory MPs to act – first to have a confidence ballot and then for the MPs to decide by a simple majority that he should go. We have seen over the past few days that the Johnson team is going to go to great lengths to keep their man at…