Jeremy's Den: Westminster Projection

🎆🎆 Mayxit Day 🎆🎆

Also 715th Anniversary of the fall of Stirling Castle to Edward I's Loup de Guerre and Wonder Woman's 68th birthday

Edited 25 July to reflect full list of new Cabinet members predicted to lose their seats

Friday morning at nine o'clock she is far away

She's leaving home after living alone for so many years

She is having fun

Something inside that was always denied for so many years

So this was the day. Mayxit Day. Theresa May, 13 July 2016 - 24 July 2019, all 1,106 days of it. She took her last PMQs this afternoon and by all accounts it was far short of a flamboyant exit. An outgoing PM suggesting that the Leader of the Opposition should step down too has to be the weirdest PMQ moment ever. I also think that Andrew Bowie's puerile attempt at fixing Theresa's Last Stand certainly did not help and only woodchipped any hopes Wee Andy ever had of becoming Scottish Secretary. The biggest irony of course is the job went to a nobody who had not publicly endorsed any candidate in the leadership race. Guess the Scottish Borista Quartet are fuming, especially Fanboy Ross Thomson who is delusional enough to have thought he had a shot at getting the job. Bully for you, Boaby Snatcher.

Theresa May's legacy will surely be closer to what Nicola Sturgeon described than to what Theresa May herself would want it to be. Especially as she totally failed to see the irony in having her last major speech in Scotland on American Independence Day and totally failed to make her point about the Preshoos Yoonion. It might get even worse though, with Welsh Independence and Irish Reunification also becoming serious future options. Englanders too should be happy to see her go as what she leaves behind is the biggest clusterfucked mess in living memory and then some generations, after three years spent setting new world records in dishonesty and incompetence. Though I have a hunch her successor has all it takes to break these records in nothing flat. Right now Treeza has already started retconning her Premiership but I doubt this will help. She will forever be remembered as the dismalest failure of a Prime Minister in recorded history. Quite an achievement when you consider she beats even Chamberlain and Cameron here.

General Election polling remains quite chaotic and contradictory but there are now some clues that it is slowly heading in a different direction, like a small realignment within the realignment. Ten polls have been fielded in July by five pollsters, with five predicting the Conservatives leading and five predicting Labour. None predicted the Brexit Party in the lead, a symbolic but significant change frome the June polls. This does not mean that we have already seen 'Brexit Peak' or that Tories and Labour are bound to regain all the lost ground from the last three months. Polls routinely show about 10% of respondents would definitely not vote and another 20% strongly lean towards abstention. Add 20% of undecideds to the mix and it is quite obvious that we are still in a period of uncertainty. Anyway the recent trends definitely show both Tories and Labour slightly up while LibDems and Brexit are both slightly down.

Only a small number of potential Brexit and LibDem voters have switched back to the two 'main' parties so far and it is too early to tell whether it's just a random variation or the start of a stronger trend. You might remember that I said recently that Labour could win the snap GE serendipitously, and not just because I like the sound of the word. Coincidentally Ipsos-MORI's Ben Page wrote an article where he concludes that a Labour victory would be nothing short of miraculous, which is basically saying the same thing with a different wording. I agree with Ben's demonstration here as I made basically the same points in previous posts, including the lack of credibility of Labour's Born Again Remainism. Tory voting intentions also don't show much of a Johnson Effect so far but this is probably bound to change in the light of events over the next few days, such as who is part of Johnson's Cabinet and who is not, and how the various Tory factions react to his first hours as Prime Minister. Next week's polls should enlighten us on all this.

Now is also as good a time as any to take a closer look at what psephologists and prognosticators call the pollsters' 'house effect'. This is the result of some sort of statistical voodoo and depends highly on how pollsters weigh their raw data before producing their headline results. Pollsters don't publish their detailed tweaking algorithms but only the basic principles of their weighting. Usual main ingredients are demographics, which can be off as pollsters don't use the exact same categories, recalled votes at past elections, which pollsters themselves admit can be wrong, likelihood of voting at the next election, which is volatile and possibly misleading as respondents might lie about it. So the mix of secret recipes and contradictory results naturally produces a healthy distrust in polls, especially when they get several elections wrong in quick succession. Or suspicion of bias, the most frequent case being YouGov, the most prominent and prolific pollster, being accused of systemic pro-Tory bias. Which is not necessarily supported by actual data.

Above are the weighted voting intentions from the ten polls fielded in July, sorted by pollster and with the numbers in brackets indicating the number of polls fielded by each. All four of YouGov's July polls have Conservatives in the lead, which might be read as pro-Tory bias as the other pollsters have Labour in the lead. But the Conservative voting intentions are on average the same in YouGov's recent polls as in other pollsters' so I venture the perceived pro-Tory bias is in fact the result of how their tweaks underestimate the Labour vote. I won't try to explain how and why YouGov find Labour 8% below the others' average while LibDems are 4% above, Greens 3% above and the Brexit Party 1% above. It obviously has to do with different weightings and tweaks on the raw data, but I am not privy to the recipes. So all we can do is taking the published headline results as they are, while fully aware that numbers don't always add up and might even not represent the exact state of public opinion. So be it.

My current Poll'O'Polls includes the six most recent ones for which full data and crosstabs have been made available online, fielded between 9 and 24 July, so you can't be more up-to-date than this. Super-sample size is 9,976 with a theoretical 0.95% margin of error, which is actually not really relevant when polls remain contradictory. The current weighted average of voting intentions should give nobody any reason to celebrate. The winning party, whoever they are, would represent less than 25% of voters, which would probably translate into just about 20% of the whole electorate. An all time low and another sign, if we ever needed one, of a deep crisis. The Westminster System is indeed broken and don't expect any of the English parties to offer a solution as they are all part of the problem.

The weighted average fits with the overall trends with both the Brexit Party and the LibDems now back to below 20%. It shows that there was indeed a ripple effect from the European election in earlier polls and that it is now starting to wear out. Which does not mean that LibDems and Brexit have lost all influence on the result of the forthcoming snap GE. If, as seems likely, both finally reach a plateau on about 12%, the LibDems could still gain a dozenish seats and the Brexit Party could still make the Conservatives lose some and the election. Part of the reasons behind the recent shifts in voting intentions are shown by the comparison between the current voting intentions and the 2017 votes.

The Conservatives are in somewhat better shape than previously as they would lose 'only' 30% of their 2017 voters to the Brexit Party instead of the 50% they lost at the European election and in earlier polls. Labour apparently fare better but still lose 25-30% of their voters to the more reliably Europhile parties, and the probability of gaining them all back is slim indeed even after a policy U-turn. Again the SNP have the most faithful electorate. And these numbers tell only part of the story as the Labour and LibDems stats come from GB-wide polls and don't properly show the amount of their 2017 Scottish voters who have since switched to the SNP. Scotland-only polls say it might be as much as 10-15% of LibDem voters and 15-20% of Labour voters. The next round of Scottish polling, probably in the next few days, will tell us more about this. GB-wide we have another vision of the shifts in votes when looking at the voting intentions by region.

The Brexit Party have lost first party status everywhere and are now close to their national average in all English regions and Wales. It is not a good sign for them as an evenly distributed vote is a recipe for success only when you're the dominant party and with a strong lead, think SNP here, not when you're the challenger. The LibDems learnt that already the hard way at previous elections. The regional distribution also shows that the old Tory and Labour strongholds have not yet been restored. Only caveat here is of course the way FPTP works. With many seats coming out as three-way or even four-way marginals, a seat can technically be held or gained on 25-30% of the popular vote. Which of course could provide a neat restarting point for yet another debate on electoral reform. But that's another story. For now.

Election Night 2019 will indeed be quite suspenseful if the actual vote reflects current voting intentions. A hung Parliament again with Labour as first party but already seeking reliable coalition partners as they would be 63 seats shy of a majority. Or 60 shy with the almost certain addition of SDLP to the early mix. Then finding the way to a strong and stable full coalition, be it Rainbow Min or Rainbow Max, might prove to be quite a task. Basic math says the obvious first choice here is Lab-SDLP-Lib as it would bag 331 seats, an 18-seat majority. But in this ever changing political landscape, of course there is again more here than meets the eye at first glance.

So now we have Jo Swinson ruling out any deal with a Corbyn-led Labour. How unexpected…. naw, just kidding, she had already said it. This is darkly reminiscent of Nick Clegg in 2010 stating with a straight face he would consider a Rainbow Coalition if Gordon Brown stood down, when he had in fact decided from the start to go into coalition with the Conservatives no matter what. Is being a Clegg-clone the best Swinson can do? Then she might have to face a reality check some time soon, as this very issue might cause a rift between Orange Bookers and Beveridgers about the longer-term implications of not supporting Labour after voters handed them first-party status. Then Labour members themselves may have offered Corbyn a way out of the dilemma, or at least some food for thought if the last YouGov Topical poll is to be believed. It has a wide range of questions but let's just see what Labour members have to say on the juiciest three: coalition with the LibDems, coalition with the SNP, Scottish Independence. And how the views of Scottish Labour members and Momentum members, the Vanguard of Corbynism, differ from the average.

The most stunning result here is obviously that Scottish Independence is no longer the absolute taboo it used to be, with even a third of Scottish Labbers and a majority of Momentum members supporting is when you count undecideds out. A sign that Jeremy Corbyn should think it through and listen more to his closest supporters than to Richard Leonard. The overwhelming majority for an SNP alliance also denotes that Labour members are fully aware they have more in common with the SNP than with the Libdems. Even a majority of Scottish Labbers support it though they are the exception in preferring a LibDem alliance, probably based on fond memories of just such an alliance in Holyrood. What I see here is that Labour members would rather see a Corbyn government firmly anchored left of center by the SNP than being dragged into some incarnation of English Macronism by the LibDems. It is also significant that a majority of Momentum members oppose the LibDem alliance and that they prefer the SNP alliance by a much wider margin than average. Time will tell which way the party leadership and especially the PLP choose to go, at a time when election predictions show them to be much more resilient than the Conservatives to the LibDem and Brexit surges.

The breakdown of projected seats by meta-region outside Scotland is quite comforting for Labour as the would gain more seats from the Conservatives than they lose to the Brexit Party everywhere, except in London where they would lose more seats to the LibDems than the Conservatives and even lose a few to the Conservatives. Labour here also benefit from an unusual oddity of FPTP. The usual pattern is that a tie in the popular vote, as we have now, favours the Conservatives. But right now it works the other way round as the Brexit Party snatches far fewer Labour voters than Conservatives. So the split right-wing vote, also including Tory Remainers switching to the LibDems, delivers a massive bonus to Labour even in Southern Little England. What remains to be seen is if the Johnson Effect in the next batch of polls will change that, and my hunch is that it will, at least temporarily until a larger number of potential LibDem voters switch back to Labour to defeat Johnson. Again time will tell.

On current polling 174 seats would change hands, close to what we had in 1997. Of course the summary and cartography of gains and losses illustrate how different the 2019 realignment would be from the 1997 realignment, if 2019 can even be called a realignment at all. As Johnson was quick to appoint his Cabinet, we already have ten fatalities out of thirty-two Cabinet members officially announced tonight: Alister Jack to the SNP; Dominic Raab and Geoffrey Cox to the LibDems; Brandon Lewis, Mark Spencer and Kwasi Kwarteng to the Brexit Party; Amber Rudd, Nicky Morgan, Alok Sharma and Robert Buckland to Labour. And the body count will grow higher when all 120ish Government Payroll positions are filled. Despite doing better than ten days ago, Labour would still lose six members of the Shadow Cabinet, including the two from Scotland.

All hope is not lost though for the predicted losers as 139 seats qualify as marginals, including half of those predicted to change hands. The updated cartography of marginals shows that far fewer now involve the Brexit Party, so for the alternate scenarios I have now returned to the more traditional Lab Max vs Con Max rather than the Brexit Min/Max in my recent projections.

Whichever way the marginals go, the Conservatives still lose the election. Only the sort of coalition Labour would have to build changes. Much would then depend on the LibDems' final decision. Is their stated ambition to oust Johnson stronger than their dislike for Corbyn? Now the funniest outcome would be the Lab Max scenario where they could tell the LibDems to get fucked and choose the SNP alliance that 83% of their members support. Guess that Corbyn would then find it a good idea to send Keir Starmer to Bute House to negotiate the terms, rather than going himself.

And now the die is cast. Boris Johnson is the new and probably last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and some time soon the first First Minister of England. I would like to congratulate Jeremy Hunt on his outstanding success in bagging more than the 20% of the vote some polls predicted, and a majority among those who actually voted Conservative at the last European election. Now the UK has a new and major problem: the former PM was a walking dead and the new one is a running joke. Johnson's Premiership did not start in the best way as being accused of talking rubbish by the EU even before his appointment was official can sort of ruin your day. Then I guess Johnson does not really care as he has been accused of far worse all along his career, and each en every time it was true. But the Great Culling of the Huntistas certainly made his evening fucking enjoyable. Only the Scottish Tories now have a thousand reasons and some to be anxious, as sacking David Mundell was a deliberate humiliation aimed at Ruth Davidson, and what lies ahead for them Beyond Brexit is certain electoral annihilation. Bully for them.

People obviously have low expectations for a Johnson Cabinet and it might have a low life expectancy too if rebel-wannabes Tory MPs prove themselves to be as bitey as they are barky and make good on their threats to do whatever it takes to prevent a no-deal Brexit. Labour are already working on it with Keir Starmer initiating contacts with high-ranking Tories. Interestingly we don't have Tom Watson or even John McDonnell tasked with this, another sign in my opinion that Starmer is destined to play a bigger role in the near future than he is usually credited with. Don't rule out Deputy PM Starmer just yet, or even PM Starmer, as in one of my pet scenarios. The probability of a snap GE in the short term has also dramatically increased as many have already accepted the idea of the Johnson Government going down before the Conference Recess. Mark my words: the snap GE will be held on Brexit Day, 31 October, and it will be both tricky and a treat. Tricky as finding a new viable majority will be quite a task, and a treat at the sight of both Johnson going down and Corbyn struggling to find out how to approach the SNP without actually approaching them.

The next few weeks promise to be exciting so look out for all new upsets and gaffes, and stay tuned for further broadcasts.

The white bird of hope can be as elusive as the butterfly's ghost
(Voyage to the bottom of the sea, episode And five of us are left, 1965)

Jeremy's Den

24/07/2019

Westminster Projection - Mayxit Day Special

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