United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[TheTide]

A few more letters being sent after this one?
https://twitter.com/lara_spirit/status/1770685592264700387

Worth nothing, now we have the crosstabs, just how grim it looks under the hood too:

• Tories on 10% among under 50s, only 2% ahead of the Greens.
• Reform lead the Conservatives in the North of England.
• Reform have a larger share of the male vote than the Tories.
• The Tories only lead Reform by 6% among those over 65.

Sky news is going to be incredibly fun to watch when the election happens.

Why do you keep saying this over and over in the thread? Firstly it adds nothing and secondly you're misinformed.

Sky News UK isn't anything like the right-wing Sky News Australia. They're completely separate entities sharing little more than a name. Sky here is no more pro-Tory than BBC or ITV.

If you mean GB News, the actual right-wing broadcaster, then you might have a point. But I suspect even they will be saying that Sunak deserves the thrashing and that this will cause a right-wing comeback or something.

Sky News is now owned by Comcast IIRC. It did have something of a reputation as having a mildly centre-right bias years ago, when it was still under the Murdoch Empire.

The 'fun' comment has merit if it refers to the graphics, which tend to be far superior to those of the BBC and ITV. I'm interested to see how GB News does on that particular front actually.

Btw, Laura K and Clive Myrie are being lined up as co-hosts of the BBC coverage.

www.thesun.co.uk/news/26252808/laura-kuenssberg-bbc-election-night-news-anchor/

Alas having multiple frontline presenters probably means that it will move even further away from, you know, actual results.

[TheTide]

The real uncertainty I have is the liberals; the polling shows they have lost what 30% of their 2019 vote to Labour and there will be a number of seats where they get overtaken by Labour but equally when you look at the swings they were getting in the 2022 and 2023 locals you can see a case for them doing better than labour in some of these south-east & south-west shire seats.

Btw, Laura K and Clive Myrie are being lined up as co-hosts of the BBC coverage.

Ugh, just give it to Myrie. You need someone with a bit of authority and gravitas in the chair, especially in that first hour after polls close, when representatives from both parties are trying desperately to spin the exit poll into something it's clearly not.

I've always been a BBC guy on election night, but if it's an option between "Laura K" nodding sagely in agreement as Ric Holden assures her the Tories can still win, and Beth Rigby verbally skewering whichever poor cabinet sod gets wheeled out on Sky to convince us Rome isn't burning, I know which option I'll be picking.

ITV actually had quite good coverage last time; I'm certainly not a huge fan of either Gideon or Ed B but they had a good rotating cast of ex politicians, good lobby journalists and just had an interesting format- there really is a niche for a very in-depth and analytical election night program. The BBC feel a need to do a 'well this really nerdy...' when most people watching it at 2am already know what it is and that they are one...

But yes it's strange to put someone as unpopular as Laura K in it- her sunday show has hardly been a success.

Her previous role as political editor also isn't exactly a natural route to such a position. Since election night coverage began in the aftermath of the War, the vast majority of presenters have been either regular newsreaders or 'special events' specialists such as the Dimblebys. Nick Robinson (reasonably well-liked despite his Tory past) would make much more sense.

Presumably Jeremy Vine will continue to be the swingometer guy. Opinions on him are fairly mixed. An important role is the 'grilling interviewer' - this has provided many memorable moments going back to at least 1964 when there was an 'interesting' encounter between Robin Day and George Brown. It won't be Neil or Paxman. Jo Coburn would be a reasonable choice, far better-suited to it than she is to being a presenter (a role she has for by-elections when the BBC bothers to cover them).

[TheTide]

The Lib Dems winning more seats than 1997 on 2/3rds the vote share, and up less than a point on 2019 still feels a bit off to me. Could their vote really get *that* efficient? I kinda think they're underpolled and are going to stumble into 16-18% through strong seconds in the shires.
And I just can't see that Reform UK vote coming out in an election. They're getting pitiful donations (less than Sinn Fein last year!) and I really can't imagine them sustaining an election campaign on the level of UKIP 2015, much less getting a similar result.

The gap between the Lib Dems and the Tories in percentage terms is actually lower than it was in 1997 on this.

[TheTide]

Well it is becoming clearer that Sunak isn't going to call a GE *before* this weeks elections (not that I ever thought that a realistic possibility anyway)

Afterwards? Who knows.

But still October onwards should be the default assumption.

Scotland play Germany in the opening match of Euro 2024 in the evening of Friday the 14th of June. It taking place in the immediate aftermath of an SNP wipeout (or, indeed, a shockingly good SNP performance) would make the atmosphere a wee bit more interesting.

[TheTide]

There is a constituency poll showing Penny Mordaunt narrowly ahead in her Portsmouth North constituency. It should be noted that this poll was commissioned by her constituency party and asked respondents what they thought of her before it asked the voting intention question.

There isn't actually all that much extraordinary about the results of the poll. The swing implies a Labour lead of around 18% on a national basis (i.e. pretty much exactly what the national polls are showing) and the Reform share (15%) is somewhat higher than what most of the national polls are showing in a somewhat more Brexity-than-average seat.

[TheTide]

Convergence gets closer-
https://twitter.com/lara_spirit/status/1785894700496388140

Would any aspiring leadership candidate be shameless enough to 'arrange' a poll to be released in the next two or three days showing Reform ahead of the Tories? I seem to recall similar tactics being used in the past.

[TheTide]

Maybe it's because my 20s are behind me, but life seems to go by terrifyingly fast nowadays. It's frightening to me that it's only another six weeks until the Solstice. The consolation is that the ~six months until the general election will presumably go by fast too.

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https://twitter.com/lara_spirit/status/1788462769970233813

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Reports from Tory HQ suggests that the official 20:80 campaign is now being changed to 20:200, with every tory seat with less than 15,000 majority being marked as vulnerable and being given extra party support (and some seats with a higher majority - they mention Weston-Super-Mare in particular).

In swing terms I make that roughly 15% or less.

[TheTide]

Remember that Michael Heseltine (the then-Deputy Prime Minister, no less) predicted a Tory majority of 40 just before the 1997 general election.

[TheTide]

And today Sunak has a re-election pitch that seems to amount to "things are so dangerous and scary that you can't risk voting for anyone else, but give us another five years - totally ignoring our record for the previous 14 - and everything will suddenly become wonderful. Honest!"

Seriously, who is advising him on this stuff?

There was a live page on the BBC News website covering the speech. Amusingly, I was one of only 23 people viewing it when I first clicked on it and the page seemed to have been up for a good half an hour.

[TheTide]

Why has turnout fallen? It was in the high 70s for most of the post war era but in the 60s starting with Blair. The vote record remains John Major in 1992! The UK has nearly 10 million more people now.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050929/voter-turnout-in-the-uk/

I think at least part of the answer is that people born in the first three decades of the 20th century had an overall firmer view of voting being a duty. Some were still of working age in 1992 but by the 2000s they were a much smaller part of the electorate for obvious reasons. Clearer class distinctions and boundaries probably played a role too. The big drop in 2001 was also aided by the seeming inevitability about the result and the view that politics was 'boring' (more so than usual).

[TheTide]

Throw it in the average, but man...
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1792556360913072303

39% was a pretty standard score for Labour in Scotland between the rise of nationalism as a significant political force in the 1960s and the 2014 referendum.

[TheTide]

More speculation about an imminent election call in view of tomorrow's inflation figures. It almost certainly won't happen, but Sunak really ought to name a date in order to stop this constant cycle of speculation (which obviously isn't helpful to him or to his party), even if that date is circa six months away. This kind of thing has happened in other Parliamentary democracies and of course many countries have fixed election dates. In the case of 2015 it was known to a 99% certainty that the election would be on the 7th of May that year for years beforehand.

[TheTide]

I don't know how anyone can look at the mess in the UK right now and think that fixed terms are somehow a bad thing for meh "political culture" reasons or whatever.

I'm not sure that the lack of fixed terms has much at all to do with it. On the other hand, they were arguably a detriment when we did have them, particularly in 2019.

[TheTide]

Seeing multiple tweets such as this from prominent journos. Shipman has or had good inside sources when it comes to the Tory Party (he wrote the quintessential 'inside story' book on the Brexit campaign for example) so maybe slightly less salt need applying than usual.

https://twitter.com/ShippersUnbound/status/1793215724011327507

https://twitter.com/JasonGroves1/status/1793214743236206837

https://twitter.com/Smyth_Chris/status/1793217385198944578

[TheTide]

July is now odds-on on Betfair, ftr.

https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.223758498

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Hmm...

https://twitter.com/AlexDaviesJones/status/1793227483967340581

[TheTide]

https://twitter.com/JasonGroves1/status/1793233076010504426

Of course, today is also Sunak's weekly meeting with Brian.

[TheTide]

If you are not planning to do something, then you probably should categorically state that you aren't planning to do it to Swinford (one of the leading scoop journalists around) when he asks you.

https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1793252984609996953

[TheTide]

Other tidbits and rumours: Hunt standing down, Sunak himself standing down, Number 10 SPADs meeting at 2.

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https://twitter.com/ITVJoel/status/1793255148212330618

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Reading between the lines he's got reliable inside sources telling him that it's on? In any case it's now up to the level of perhaps the most well-known political broadcast journalist. Don't think the previous rounds of speculation went above newspaper editors etc, if that.

https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1793255310670323739

[TheTide]

It is very Sunak that the speculation and chatter has become increasingly wild and unrestrained, something that is never actually very helpful as it sets people on edge and damages trust inside your own camp. It isn't hard to quietly direct speculation in a particular direction.

There were similar situations during the late period of Boris Johnson's premiership regarding Sunak and his future in the cabinet.

[TheTide]

Possibly the silliest piece of speculation I've seen is that it's Royal-related. This wasn't at all how it played out in e.g. September 2022 or even earlier this year with the cancer announcements.