UPDATED: As UK COVID deaths drop to zero some of today’s front pages
Retaining current controls is going to be difficult
Trump becoming an even stronger betting favourite for the WH2024 Republican nomination
Although we have largely igonored US politic since Biden was inaugurated the former president continues to work hard to undermine the WH2020 outcome and remains the most powerful political force in his party. No Republican politician who wants to be re-elected is going to deny Trump’s big lie that the last election was stolen from him. Even big figures like Senator Mitch McConnell are going along with this even though it is in direct contradiction to what they said on…
Supporting a better infrastructure is fine until it is your house that they want to demolish
What is dominating politics where I live at the moment is nothing to do with the pandemic or Brexit but about the planned East West railway – an overall project that was announced by Chris Grayling when he was TransportSec in 2017. Most of the route between Oxford and Cambridge uses existing tracks but for the central section a completely new line is going to have to be built and working out exactly where that will run impacts a lot…
Comparing the latest polling – pollster by pollster
With Opnium showing a markedly differently CON lead than the other firms it is useful just look at all of the numbers firm by firm. Most have the Tories in a fairly tight 42-46% range With LAB the range at 28% – 36% is wider. My view is that both YouGov and Opinium’s LAB ratings could be thought of as possible outliers. There’s a big range with the LDs from the 6% of Opinium to the 10% of Survation. The…
“Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat: we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem”
There has been much talk, since the advent of the vaccines, of a ‘return to normal’ in our lives with many organisations, not least Government, pressing for getting things back on track as soon as safely possible particularly in areas such as education. And whilst there is much debate about what is or is not ‘safely possible’ and at what point normality should return, no one seems to have asked whether we actually want to go back to normal or…
The Indy publishes LD data suggesting that Chesham & Amersham could be competitive
Over the past week or so I have been suggesting that the best value political bet at the moment is the 20/1 or thereabouts that you can get on the LDs taking Chesham and Amersham which votes on June 17th. This has been reinforced by this report from the Independent . With a 16,223 majority to overturn from the 2019 general election, Lib Dem candidate Sarah Green has a mountain to climb to challenge for a shock victory in the…
On his wedding day Johnson sees rating hits on approval, competence, and likeability
Generally I do not work Sundays and never really get the chance of getting into the findings of my favourite pollster, Opinium, which comes out every other weekend in the Observer. It has by far the best and comprehensive datasets of any pollster and has been running regular approval ratings longer than any other firm and its surveys always carry a range of leadership questions. The fieldwork for today’s poll took place after Wednesday’s seven hour appearance by Johnson’s former…