politicalbetting.com

According to an excellent long read by Tim Shipman in tomorrow’s Sunday Times last Monday morning at a meeting with aides the PM was apoplectic and raging about his Chancellor. This had been sparked by Sunak’s leaked letter to his boss a calling significant easing of the coronavirus travel restrictions and other measures. Shipman writes: In a fit of frustrated impotence, Johnson openly suggested that he might sack his chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak..The problem was that the first…

Read More Read More

How will it go down in the “Red Wall” seats? If BoJo’s aim when he made his joke about pit closures was to get coverage for his Scottish trip then he has succeeded but he appears to have touched a raw nerve about one of the most difficult periods during the UK’s recent history. This is from the Independent: The prime minister was reported to have chuckled as he made the comment about his Tory predecessor’s wholesale closure of pits,…

Read More Read More

This is the sort of comment that looks set to be remembered and could be damaging. In many ways he was right but he could have expressed himself very differently given the impact that the move away from coal had on many communities across Britain. This reinforces established perceptions that the Tories didn’t care. Paul Waugh in his Tweet above reckons that there will be a “clarification” from Number 10. The danger here is that this would focus attention on…

Read More Read More

Johnson’s figure is the lowest since October last year. Patel hasn’t been polled before but her numbers are comparable with those for Corbyn ahead of GE2019. Starmer has seen a slight improvement but just 23% were favourable to him. The big issue with him is that 39% have no view and that is likely to change as things like next month’s LAB conference will give him more coverage. Whether that will be up or down we will have to wait…

Read More Read More

Much of this can be explained by the need to tackle COVID If it hadn’t been for the fight against COVID the above changed perceptions in this Ipsos MORI polling would be quite worrying for ministers. For since the baseline, the last general election in December 2019 there has been one overwhelming priority for the government and that has been the impact of coronavirus. So I don’t read too much into the above except that this needs to changes between…

Read More Read More

Our vaccine programme is on the whole going well, however despite falling case rates ( At least when I wrote this piece) the virus could well resurge in the autumn and winter. I do not think restricting people’s (particularly those who have done the right and community minded thing) liberty is a step that should be taken again even if cases do rise. The vaccines are very very good at preventing hospitalisations and death – which is the metric any…

Read More Read More