In a Darwinian way, there is no point in, you know, any of us going into this business unless we want to get as far as we can. Otherwise, we’re no good to man or beast. We’ve got to, we’ve got to want to compete. We’ve got to, to do as well as we can. Can I go now?
(Boris Johnson)
(Boris Johnson)
© Neil Young, 1973
This version recorded live at the St Paul Civic Center, St Paul, 15 October 1978
The trouble with my method is it’s inspirational, and as a result I sometimes get things arse-about-face. Too clever by half. Too clever by two or three and a half.
(Endeavour Morse, Inspector Morse, 1987)
It's Thursday, the 4th of July, 2024. Or, as it will be known by posterity, Election Day. It's 6 PM, or 18:00 if military parlance is more your lingo, and four hours from now we will have the BBC's Exit Poll, that will tell us who the next Prime Minister will probably be. Then twenty-four hours from now, we will have the actual results, that will tell us who the next Prime Minister will actually be. And that will be the end of that story that started four years, five months and three weeks ago, and saw the Conservative Party chew and spit out two successive Prime Ministers, before the Good People Of These Isles spat out the third one in as many years. Or, if you are a Telegraph columnist, just a few hours left before the Seven Angels blow their trumpets and the Hounds Of Hell are unleashed. Anyway, we will know for sure soon enough. In the meanwhile, it still does look like a very one-sided competition, if the trends of the 1,502 polls fielded in the 1,666 days since the last election are to be believed. One thousand and the Number Of The Beast, don't say you have't been warned.
One of the shocking parts of this election's campaign is how many pollsters, whom I did not always name and shame, have changed their methodology, often at the very last moment, and pretended it was done to 'better represent undecided voters'. That's bollocks, undecideds are undecided, full stop. It's no coincidence that all this tweaking of polls' results went in one direction exclusively, increasing the Conservatives' voting intentions and decreasing Labour's. I have my conspiracy theory about this, namely that it happened because the metropolitan punditariat had a point to make, and the pollstertariat was only too happy to help them make it. The point being, of course, that it was all too good to be true, and that Labour's lead could only shrink dramatically, as it did in 1997. Because pundits know best, don't they? Their problem is that, even on doctored opinion polls, it simply did not happen. Sure, Labour have lost votes over the last six weeks, but the Conservatives have too. The Centre Holds.
In 1997, Labour were leading by 27.5% on Dissolution Day and it fell to 12.5% on Election Day. This year, they were leading by 21.8% on Dissolution Day and it has fallen to 18.6% on Election Eve. Three points down today against fifteen points down in 1997. I guess that makes the case, especially as the last week's Tory surge was entirely voters switching back to Team Blue after considering a Reform UK vote earlier. Despite all evidence, the punditariat kept promoting the myth of the 'Shy Tory', who would jump out of his box and save the Conservatives at the last second, even after it had been debunked by an actual study by Redfield & Wilton. It's certainly not a coincidence that the only pollster to go against the common wisdom is also one of the few that make enough dosh from their commercial corporate surveys to self-fund their political polling, and do it pretty much pro bono without seeking sponsorship in the media establishment. Spoiler alerts, mates: there are no Shy Tories left now, they have made up their mind and are voting Reform UK.
I think, like, it’s very important for politics that people should be, people should feel that the top job is coveted. You know, we’re all like wasps in a jam jar trying to survive.
(Boris Johnson)
(Boris Johnson)
© Neil Young, 1975
This version recorded live at Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, 16 February 1991
There are signs if you know how to read them. A lamb with two heads was born in the spring.
(Dowsable Chattox, Endeavour: Harvest, 2017)
My final rolling average of voting intentions has to be as close as possible to a hypothetical Last Day Poll. So I selected only the polls that were released over the last three days, even if polling started a wee smitch earlier. That's seventeen overall, seventeen fucking polls in three fucking days, more evidence of the polling frenzy that has captured the whole British media sector since Rishi Sunak wetted himself in public six weeks ago. There were also four more mammoth MRP polls on top but, as I said, I don't use them as they tend to pollute the gene poll. That's a super-sample of 58,037, roughly the full load displacement in short tons of HMS Ark Royal, the Royal Navy's last full-fledged aircraft carrier that actually worked. In this last mile before Decision Time, we have Labour leading by 19% overall, 20% in Wales and 6% in Scotland. Which, all ideology aside, is quite an achievement after the kind of campaign we've had. The Great British Public definitely want to play it safe, make sure that the Conservatives are out for good, and won't take fools for an answer. Fine by me, matey. But that's a predicted success Labour should not gloat too loudly about, as it has all the ingredients of a victory by default. And also harbours all the seeds for a gathering of dark clouds on the horizon.
In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn's New Old Labour narrowly inflicted a hung Parliament on poor Theresa May, on 40% of the popular vote and the biggest swing towards Labour since the days of Tony Blair. Today, Keir Starmer's New New Labour is predicted to oust Rishi Sunak's Nightmare Team in a landslide, on 40% of the vote and the biggest swing towards Labour since the days of Clement Attlee. There is a lot to learn from a comparison of today's predicted votes in the Nations of the Realm and the regions of England, and how the votes went in 1997. Labour is stronger now in the English South, but weaker everywhere else, in the regions that actually made the Blair Landslide. The big, and instantly visible, difference, is that the far-right vote was pretty much non-existent 27 years ago. UKIP was still in its infancy and hardly more than an assorted bunch of loonies only motivated by their hatred of the European Union. The combined votes for all the far-right tribes was 174k, or 0.6% of all votes cast. Today, Reform UK are likely to bag over 15%, summat like 5 million votes. Which they snatched mostly from the Conservatives, and that's how Labour could win the biggest victory in their whole history on a rather mediocre share of the popular vote.
There is a lot to unpack here, starting with the massive irony embedded at the core of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Which is fine by me, as I never believed it is a human right to be represented in Parliament because your neighbours all vote for you. The widely anticipated epic electoral trainwreck in France shows that even a two-round majority system, which is summat of a watered-down FPTP, can fail to deliver a parliamentary majority. So why would we be daft enough to get rid of a system that does? Well, most of the time. It's not undemocratic to value strong and stable government more than representation of the fifty shades of loonies that haunt the political spectrum. Or, to put it in more performative terms, to consider dictatorship of the majority, which is the very definition of representative democracy, a lesser evil than dictatorship of the minorities.
Your question will find its answer, but it may not be the one you seek. You are going on a journey. Death waits at the end, but not for you.
(Dowsable Chattox, Endeavour: Harvest, 2017)
© Neil Young, Jeff Blackburn, 1978
There are things in the world older than you know. We come and go. But the land endures.
(Dowsable Chattox, Endeavour: Harvest, 2017)
As you might expect from the Election Eve voting intentions, the final seat projection still predicts a Labour victory, and in the same stellar way that we anticipated just a month or two ago. It's better than Attlee in 1945 and Blair in 1997, and the Conservatives are dong worse than in my early June projection, likely to end up with fewer than 100 seats, which is definitely a portent of terminal decay. I am actually not sure that the Great British Public's mood has changed that much in just a matter of days. I have a hunch that the drop in Labour's voting intentions has more to do with a swarm of pollsters changing their methodologies in ways that weakened Labour, and then flooding the time-space continuum with a new poll every other day. It did not really tweak the resulting projections, thanks to the LibDem surge and the new geography of the Labour vote. We will know in a matter of hours if these pollsters made a clever move, or just a cheap stunt that pursued ulterior motives, should never have happened and now has to be repealed. At the risk of being proved wrong before midnight, my tenner is on the latter option.
As this is my last entry before the results are unveiled, I will also offer you a comparison of the different seat projections you get when you change the algorithms. You can go for the simpler solutions, and apply either full uniform swing or full proportional swing, without any floral embellishments added on the fringes. If you don't remember the difference, it's pretty much like flat tax vs progressive tax, or you might want too look up that slightly more elaborate Canadian explanation I referred you to earlier. The point here is that, whichever way you shake and stir, the Conservatives are too far gone for recovery, and Labour get a bigger majority than in 1997. For completeness, I have added the latest projections from Electoral Calculus and Election Maps UK, who both used aggregates of polls quite similar to mine, and then read their entrails with recipes of their own. Plus the assorted batch of the most recent MRP polls, provided by different pollsters who love nothing more than disagreeing with each other.
The uniform swing and proportional swing are just the statistical results of the relevant formulas applied to all seats without injecting any local peculiarities. My model, as you surely remember, is a mix of uniform and proportional swing, with an injection of localism on the basis of the regional crosstabs of generic polls. When the overall sample is big enough and detailed enough, it does make sense and is surely a better approach of the subtleties that the headline numbers of generic polls can't capture. The most salient feature here is the huge difference in the number of predicted LibDem seats. This is exactly the sort of thing you will never catch without smarter algorithms and source data, as basic maths will never factor in how wildly unevenly spread the current LibDem vote is, which is the key to their success. The numbers from the MRP polls, Electoral Calculus and Election Maps are fully their own, without interference or correction. They all have their own sausage-making recipes, which I am not privy too, so I just take their word for it as none looks outlandish. We will know tomorrow who was right and who was wrong, or if all of us were wrong, which is still a possibility even with the most finely honed algorithms.
The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth, and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.
(Revelation 8:7)
© Neil Young, 2012
And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea, and the third part of the sea became blood.
(Revelation 8:8)
Lucid Talk did not fail us and have conducted one last poll of voting intentions in Northern Ireland, in time to be relayed by the Belfast Telegraph on the last Friday of the campaign. This is an interesting poll indeed and it includes both a continuation of earlier trends, and an unexpected upset. At the 2019 election, the Unionist camp bagged 42% of the vote, the Republican camp 40% and the non-communitarian, or non-sectarian, parties and independents 18%. Now the Republicans are down to 39% and the Unionists to 38%, while the Neutrals have surged to 23%. But there are differences between the two camps. The balance of power within the Republican camp, between Sinn Féin and the SDLP, has gradually gone back pretty much to where it was in 2019, and they have lost less than the Unionists to the centrist Alliance Party. On the Unionist side, the DUP's dominance is threatened by the more moderate UUP gaining back lost ground, and also by the more radical TUV standing at this general in a deal with Reform UK, when they sat out the 2019 general. So there might be a ticking time-bomb now at the heart of the Northern Irish political system, beyond today's general and into the next Assembly election.
The seat projection from this very last poll has three seats changing hands, instead of two in the previous two polls. Unsurprisingly, we still have the DUP losing two seats, Belfast East to the Alliance Party and South Antrim to the UUP. There's now an unexpected upset too, with Sinn Féin losing the perennial marginal Fermanagh and South Tyrone to the UUP. But, if you consider the weighted average of the last two polls, which makes sense as both were conducted in June, Sinn Féin would hold the seat by a tiny margin, similar to the 2017 election when they gained it back from the UUP. In the absence of really compelling evidence, which is not evidence of absence, I will stick to that result, which is supported by the continuity of earlier polls, and still credit Sinn Féin with seven seats in my final prediction.
And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters.
(Revelation 8:10)
© Neil Young, 1974
The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.
(Alfred Edward Housman)
Contrary to a commonly peddled narrative, Scotland doe not hold the keys to the election, and never did. it was of course a very convenient soundbite for both Labour and the SNP, to maximise their respective electorates' motivation and turnout. Scotland would have held the key if Labour's lead in England had fallen to summat like 5%, but it never has, and nobody ever seriously expected it to do. The keys to the election have always been in England, especially in those parts of the Midlands and South where the outcome occasionally looked more uncertain. What's at stake here if beyond today's result, it's how the different parties will start the next campaign that has pretty much already begun, for the Scottish Parliament election of 2026. All we have seen in the polls for today's election hints that Labour will start from a better position, and will have a much stronger base than Labour themselves probably expected just two years ago. Then came Humza Yousaf, and then came John Swinney, and the SNP kept going down in Westminster polls.
The polling frenzy that hit the whole of the UK after dissolution has also reached Scotland, quite predictably. There's been an unprecedented sequence of fifteen Full Scottish polls since dissolution, six of them in the last week alone. Just as many per week as we had for the whole of Great Britain before dissolution, and also before some English pollsters felt they could make some extra dosh from Scottish polls, even if theirs don't tell us anything different from other polls. You can spot the opportunists as they only poll Westminster voting intentions, while those who care about all things Scottish also poll the Independence referendum and the Holyrood election. But I won't name-shame anyone here, you can easily work it out yourselves, can't you? I've kept only the last four polls for further scrutiny, also to avoid cluttering the chart. Savanta, one of our regular pulse-feelers, also fielded three Full Scottish in three successive weeks, so there is no harm in ditching the oldest ones. The awkward squad of SNP Believers may find solace in one poll putting them ahead of Labour on the last day of the campaign, but that does not invalidate the sequence of twenty fielded since the Greens made Humza Yousaf walk the plank, that all identify Labour as Scotland's first party.
As usual, the Electoral Calculus prediction engine tends to exaggerate Labour's tally, more precisely to lean more heavily in their direction when the gap with the SNP widens. The Conservatives' vote share is also an important adjustment factor, as gaining some Tory seats is the only way the SNP can make the expected disaster less disastrous. But it's hard to see how they can escape a major drubbing here, so it's safe to predict that Labour are very likely to bag a majority of Scottish seats, which will further weaken the case for a second independence referendum, as it will deprive the SNP of their currently best argument for it. The only real uncertainty is how deep the SNP will fall, other than it being far worse than the previous setback in 2017. Too many seats remain on a knife edge to venture a more precise prediction, even if we can probably rule out the SNP retracting to the level of the October 1974 election, when they bagged their then-best result ever, on 11 seats. Just expect some nail-biting moments at some declarations, while waiting for all the numbers to be read out by the Returning Officer.
Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be. And if it were so, it would be. But as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
(Tweedledee, Through The Looking Glass, 1871)
© Neil Young, 1990
This version recorded live at Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, 16 February 1991
And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars, so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.
(Revelation 8:12)
There is no reason to expect anything but a Labour landslide in Wales, unless there is. The sequence of Full Welsh polls now shows the Labour vote plummeting over the last few weeks. The Conservative brand is discredited there just like everywhere else, but it looks like the Welsh Labour brand is also summat tainted by the shenanigans of First Minister Vaughan Gething. The post-industrial constituencies in both North Wales and South Wales delivered some unexpected Conservative gains in 2019, and were summat like the Western pillar of the Red Wall. But the good people of Tywysogaeth Cymru are trapping Labour in a Welsh Paradox that is the same as the English Paradox. More seats on fewer votes. Which, as I pointed out already, is chemically pure FPTP. The key is not how many votes you get, but by how many you lead your runner-up. So we can only expect Labour to bag around 25 seats and the Conservatives to lose most of theirs, if not all. Plaid Cymru is not doing as well right now as they once did, so odds are they will bag no more than one gain.
On top of that, Plaid Cymru recently hired Survation for two polls of marginal Welsh seats. Recently here being back in early January, which means these polls are pretty much past their shelf date, but never mind. Their poll of Caerfyrddin has aged especially badly, as they assumed former Plaid Cymru MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr Jonathan Edwards would stand as an independent. And then he gave up and decided to quit. So any current assessment of the seat leaves him out and is just about the probability of Plaid Cymru gaining a seat that was recarved to remain with the Conservatives. The other seat that was polled, Ynys Môn, is a perennial three-way marginal, and which way it goes will be summat of a measure of Labour's success in Wales. In both cases, the uncertainty factor comes from how well Reform UK do, or don't, as they are credited with a substantial increase of their Welsh vote share. My own prediction for both seats rests on the weighted average of the last three Full Welsh, all published in the second half of June, and YouGov's most recent MRP poll.
Oddly, Survation did not include the Greens in their polls' prompts, while they are actually standing in both seats, and it was surely public knowledge already when the polls were conducted. But never mind, as it does not change my conclusions. I concur with the poll's prediction in Caerfyrddin, though not with their numbers. Other sources show that Labour is extremely weak, and Reform UK stronger than expected, in the wast reaches of rural Wales that coincide more or less with the old electoral region of Mid and West Wales. There are very different patterns in North Wales, and that's why I don't see Plaid Cymru prevailing in Ynys Môn, but Labour snatching it from terminally weakened Conservatives. Plaid Cymru also came third there in 2017 and 2019, so recent electoral history also favours Labour, on top of the obvious trends of recent polls.
And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth. And to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit, and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.
(Revelation 9:1-2)
© Bob Dylan, 1967
This version recorded live at Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, 29 August 2000
And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God.
(Revelation 9:13-14)
Now comes the riskiest moment, attempting the Last Day prediction for all regions of England outwith London. There is a clearly a massive margin for error, especially in the South, where the 2023 Boundary Review has spawned an inordinately high number of totally new seats that looked like Conservative shoe-ins at the time, but have now become the centre of the battleground. I have summed up each region with the breakdown of seats after the 1997 election, which remains the benchmark after which Keir Starmer will be judged, after the 2019 election and at dissolution. Factually, some MPs sat as Independents on Dissolution Day, as they had been withdrawn the whip by their respective parties. Here, I have kept them with their party of origin to avoid cluttering the charts, but also because keeping the original labels on all of them makes the comparison with my predictions more relevant. Let's go North first.
These predicted results in the North are quite the illustration of Labour's underlying problems and the contradictions that may well come back to bite them in the arse soon. They're on their way to win the biggest landslide in their history, the biggest for any party since 1832 actually, and they're doing pretty much just as well in the North as in 1997. Not better, just 'just as well', and even slightly less so in the North East. Which is probably good enough for Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson's focus groups, but may be the prelude to less satisfying results in the heartlands of yore at the next general. The sociology of the Labour electorate has changed, even quite dramatically so, under Keir Starmer, and so has the sociology of the English North, and they're not necessarily travelling in the same direction. There's better news in the Midlands.
That's one of the surprising features of this election, the closer you get to the Equator, the better it gets for Labour. Surely John Curtice can find a correlation here, if not a causality, and dawdlingly pontificate at length about it during the dreadfully boring hour-or-so between BBC One's exit poll and the first declaration. And he could find supporting evidence here from Birmingham to Nottingham. Labour may have bagged a fuckload of Midlands seats in 1997, but that was not their all-time high in either region. 1945 was in both. And now Keir Starmer is predicted to do just as well as Clement Attlee in the East Midlands, and much better in the West Midlands. That includes avenging Dennis Skinner in Bolsover. Maybe Keir Starmer should now have a plaque fitted to Dennis's old seat in the House's chamber, that he gallantly fought for against Little Shit from Glasgow amidst an SNP invasion. And then have it renamed Heckler's Corner and permanently reserved as exclusive seating for the longest serving Labour MP. Would be fun if that happened to be Jeremy Corbyn tomorrow at dawn. Finally comes the Leafy South, best and juiciest for last.
Of course there has to be a reward for the South East and South West being the only two regions of England where Labour is predicted a bigger share of the vote today than in 1997. And the reward is spectacular. Labour did better in all three Southern regions in 1945, when there was some working class left there, than in 1997. Now New New Labour is predicted to beat that by a massive margin, because it's no longer the party of the working class, I guess, but that of the malcontent middle class and the fad-following hipsters. Even the LibDems are having a resurrection there, for fuck's sake. Most of it on Ed Davey's own merits after his relentless unapologetic clowning all across the South, I must say, though, that they also must have benefited from the butterfly effect of Labour's unprecedented surge here and there. The Greens too, probably, bagging an unexpected gain in East Anglia. Interestingly, my model says this second Green seat would not be Waveney Valley, which was probed by a poll I will discuss after Neil's next tune, but the neighbouring Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket. But don't hold your breath, I may be wrong, as I'm likely to be for dozens of seats which I will fully reveal in due course in an extensive post-mortem.
And the seventh angel sounded, and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.
(Revelation 11)
© Neil Young, 2006
This version recorded live with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Freedom Of Speech tour, 2006
Turns my stomach to see what’s happening to this country. The Tories have turned the whole place into one gigantic knocking shop. It might be the Mother of Parliaments, but the Tories have got their hands up her skirt.
(Eddie Wells, Our Friends In The North: 1987, 1996)
We also have ten select seats in England that have been subjected to constituency-level polls, for what it's worth. Two in the North, one in the Midlands and seven in the South. I have kept only those who have been polled in 2024, as even 2023 is like a lifetime ago, and 2021 is as relevant as the Age Of Dinosaurs. It will be fun to see what actually happens in these seats, compared to not just what the polls found, but also to what the statistical approach of seat projection models said would likely happen. My prediction here is actually not fully mine. it's based on what my model projects, but slightly tweaked by factoring in a minority share of what Electoral Calculus published in their late June update, that predicted Labour bagging 465 seats and a 280-seat majority. Which does not seem extravagant, so here we go. North and Midlands first.
I tend to agree with the polls in Hartlepool and Richmond and Northallerton. On the results, if not on the numbers. I think that Reform UK have more strength and the Conservatives more resilience in Hartlepool than the We Think poll found, but Labour will gain it back anyway. Rishi Sunak will, in my opinion, have a closer race than the Survation poll found, but holding a previously ultra-safe seat that way is definitely a very inglorious exit for the wealthiest Prime Minister in living memory. You just have to wonder now if he will break yet another promise, resign at some point during the term and fly away to Santa Monica and his best life. Rishi himself is reportedly 'fearful' of losing, but does he actually mean 'hopeful'? Of course, North Herefordshire is the one I'm struggling with, as switching to the Greens looks like a very implausible move in a constituency that granted them less than 10% four years ago. Then, almost at the last minute, in came a poll of what will surely be the most, or second most, watched seat on Election Night, Bristol Central.
I had been expecting this poll to come out for a long time, and had nearly lost all hope of ever seeing it. Because this recarved seat, made mostly of bits of the old Bristol West constituency, is assessed by the punditariat as one of the possible upsets spawned by this election. If it goes the way they feel it must inevitably go, it would be even more politically significant than Nigel Farage accessing Commons through a back door. Here, Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, is hoping to unseat Labour's Shadow Culture Secretary Thangam Debbonaire. Denyer obviously hopes that today's vote will summat duplicate the previous two Council elections, that were quite successful for the Greens in the constituent wards of the constituency. But I don't see that happening, and expect Debonnaire to hold her seat, albeit with an extremely slim margin. This will spare us hasty conclusions, like 'Labour punished for not being woke enough', that we would surely see in The Guardian if Denyer won. The reason I go against the poll is that Denyer relies on the massive student population in the redrawn constituency. But, due to Rishi's fateful choice of the election date, a lot of students will be away recuperating from their jolly to Glasto, and will not vote in Bristol, but in their home constituency. Their parents' home constituency, that is, as the law permits. This will not just boost the more conservative vote of the real natives, but also take the faux progressive woke Green vote down some notches. And Thangam's your MP. Again. A bit of the South East next.
Honestly, the We Think poll of Bicester and Woodstock is the most ridiculous we've seen for years. An exact three-way split just does not exist in the real world, and that may be why they were reluctant to release the full results at first. I'm much more confident in my own algorithms, that lean towards the Liberal Democrats, though not in a massively conclusive way. Then I concur with the pollsters in the other two seats, though again only on the result and not on the numbers. I believe that the Labour wave across the South will not be as powerful as they expect, though still granting them a massive harvest of gains. And also that tactical voting in the South is more likely to favour the Liberal Democrats than Labour, more strongly than generic polls say, now that it has been firmly planted in the public's mind that Labour will bag a landslide anyway. The last triad, from the South East and East Anglia, is surely the most interesting.
Techne, the only ones who polled Portsmouth North, told us that Penny Mordaunt would hold her seat, but I'm convinced she won't. I have a hunch there might be an odd twist there, right-wing voters switching to Reform UK and letting Labour in, not out of general principles, but because they don't want a 'wokeist' Penelope to become the next leader of the Conservative Party. Simple as that. I am also far less bullish than the pollsters about Nigel Farage's chances in Clacton. He will win, but that won't be a massive coronation, because the constituency has changed since Douglas Carswell won it for UKIP on 44% of the vote. He even has Anthony Mack, local Reform UK's actual chosen one, now standing against him as an independent, and also a UKIP candidate. The count may thusly be more nail-biting than Nigel expects. Finally, I also hit a wall of disbelief in Waveney Valley, where I disagree with the lone poll predicting a Green gain. Adrian Ramsay may have been a local rising star in Norwich, just miles down the road from his newfound landing pad, but I don't buy rural Norfolk electing a bloke from The City, who never did better than 15% in his own backyard. He may do well eventually, but not that well.
I’m leaving this cesspool. I’m off to spend all my time with students who can’t even begin to understand Oxford irony. They think it’s hostile. Still, some of them love Renaissance music.
(Jake Normington, Inspector Morse, 1990)
© Neil Young, 1969
This version recorded live at the Fillmore East, New York City, 7 March 1970
My silicon chip, my ambition silicon chip, has been programmed to try to scrabble my way up this cursus honorum, you know, this ladder of things. And so you do feel a kind of sense you’ve got to.
(Boris Johnson)
The Imperial Capital is another illustration of Labour's travails, even on Keir Starmer's and Jeremy Corbyn's playground. The trends of London Polling are quite similar to what we also have in Wales, massively favourable to Labour and hinting at the plausibility of significant gains. But the most recent ones also highlight possible weaknesses and the strong plausibility of a London Paradox, similar to the English Paradox and the Welsh Paradox. London Labour is highly likely to bag slightly fewer votes than they did at the two previous elections under Jeremy Corbyn, and yet bag more seats, even possibly halving the number of Conservative MPs from Hipstershire. This would owe a lot to Reform UK surging to double digits even in the strongly Europhile capital.
Some weeks ago, Survation surveyed the chances of both the looniest Prime Minister Britain never had, and the dullest Prime Minister Britain will ever have, and you surely have all the information to guess which is which. Short of a Zombie Apocalypse, both Islington North and Holborn & St Pancras are impregnable Red Keeps, so a bit of competition on the left carries no significant risk. Or maybe it does and all pundits and prognosticators will have to eat their hats tomorrow morning. I don't expect any sort of upset in Holborn & St Pancras, as the anti-Starmer pro-Palestine vote is split between three candidates, none of whom has any chance of unseating Sly Keir. I thusly agree with the findings of that poll, but have my doubts about the other one about Islington North.
Of course, history tells us that rebels always lose when standing against their own party, and I can't think of any exception to that. When they chose to compete as independents, of course, as there are indeed counter-examples when they have defected to another party with a proper grassroots organisation. But Jeremy Corbyn is not just another rebel. He has an aura as the leader of some fantasy Rebel Alliance, and more seriously also strong personal support in the constituency he has represented for 41 years. It has also surfaced that some voters, who chose Labour in the Survation poll, did so thinking that Corbyn was still the party's candidate, and will change their vote now that they know that he isn't. So I think that the result will be much closer than Survation found, and that Labour will hold the seat by the skin of their teeth. And I'm even psychologically ready to be proved wrong and see Corbyn hold it after a couple of recounts. Just don't expect to know tonight, tomorrow around lunch hour looks more likely.
People say, oh, politicians should be careful what they say, and they should watch their words and all this sort of mumbo jumbo. I don’t agree, I really don’t. I think one of the duties of a politician is to speak his mind or her mind in so far as possible.
(Boris Johnson)
© Neil Young, 1989
This version recorded live at the Waldbühne, Berlin, 3 July 2019
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