UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

[YL]

This time it really does seem different.  Even the most pro-Boris people amongst my friends think that he should go.  Although predictably they put most of the blame on Carrie.

I think we need a new PM too but that's not news because I've never been a fan.

Do you think the people saying that if North Shropshire goes yellow that'll be the end of Johnson are right?

[YL]

Even a close result would be a moral defeat - even if the Conservative vote share drops beneath a certain point would be a moral defeat.

At this point I think the Tories would take a one vote majority in North Shropshire.

(Except, that is, for the ones who want them to lose.  I'm not convinced that such people haven't been running certain aspects of their campaign.)

[YL]

There was a stench of death 11 years into the last Tory government too. But it held on.

Changing the leader made a big difference then.  Will it this time?

Indeed I think the opposition parties should be prepared for the possibility that a new Tory leader enjoying a honeymoon decides to go for a spring election.  I don't really expect that, but they should be ready in case.

[YL]

Highly unlikely *in the spring*, surely.

Johnson surely isn't going to be gone until next year for starters, despite the present excitement.

And of course he had the rationale for a snap poll in 2019 that simply doesn't exist now.

The timescale I was thinking of involved a new leader in February.  I agree they're unlikely to call a snap election, especially with the recent memories of May's collapse in 2017, but just think the opposition parties should be prepared. 

[YL]

98 Tory rebels on one of the Covid votes tonight. That must be close to half the non-payroll votes. Haven't heard of any resignations yet.

Not sure who the rebels are, but believe Andrew Rosindell (Con, Romford) is one of them.

List here: https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/1182#noes

Seems like a mix of wings of the party.

[YL]

I think the chances of Johnson getting dislodged have, if anything, gone down in the last few days, as the scandals have been pushed off the front pages by ‘OMICRON REEEEEEE’. Whilst it’s true that a lot of Tory MP’s did rebel on vaccine passports, as has been noted above there was no real ideological consistency to those who did rebel (contrary to what is sometimes lazily assumed, plenty of people from the very Brexity right-wing of the party supported the measure, like Bill Cash), so there’s not really anything in this rebellion that provides a nucleus for a leadership challenge in the same way as, say, the rebellions against May’s Brexit deal did.

Of course, this could change if the party loses in tomorrow’s by-election, but as, I suspect, we’re now being put on track to go into a full lockdown some time in the new year, I really don’t see there being any good opportunities for MP’s to try and dislodge Johnson any time soon, and by the time that there are the wind will be well out of the sails of Partygate and all the other things that have dogged him for the last month.

I think the point is more that he has reached a nadir in trust with his MPs that he is unlikely to properly bounce back from.  That means he will only continue to lose support from MPs and members from here out.  So the next scandal that comes up (because there will be one) could be the one that finally tips this over the edge.

An aside: the reports in some media that Geoffrey Clifton-Brown will pull a Meyer are obviously nonsense.  It's not happening.  Unfortunately.

The Meyer "stalking horse" role doesn't exist under the current rules anyway.

[YL]

It's city status competition time!  We have 39 applicants, five of which aren't actually in the UK, and some are really really tiny.

England: Alcester, Warwickshire [1]; Blackburn; Bolsover [2]; Boston, Lincolnshire; Bournemouth; Colchester; Crawley; Crewe; Doncaster; Dorchester, Dorset; Dudley; Goole [3]; Guildford; Marazion, Cornwall [4]; Medway [5]; Middlesbrough; Milton Keynes; Newport and Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight; Northampton; Reading; Warrington; Warwick

Wales: Wrexham

Northern Ireland: Ballymena; Bangor, Co. Down; Coleraine

Scotland: Dumfries; Dunfermline; Elgin [6]; Greenock; Livingston; Oban; St. Andrews; South Ayrshire [7]

Isle of Man: Douglas; Peel

Falkland Islands: Stanley

Cayman Islands: George Town

Gibraltar: Gibraltar

[1] I wonder how many people know where this is and how to pronounce it.
[2] Do they want a reward for electing a Tory MP or something?
[3] LOL
[4] Even smaller than St Davids, presumably just trying for a bit of publicity
[5] They'd probably have a better chance if they just applied for Rochester to get it back.
[6] Used to be a city, and thinks it still is.
[7] WTF?  Did they mean to apply for Ayr?

[YL]

As usual, some of the individual MRP seat projections are a bit hard to believe.

The most striking thing is how badly it shows the Lib Dems as doing; probably this is mainly because it doesn't pick up tactical voting for them.  This actually saves the Tories in quite a few seats they should lose on these figures.

There are a few other oddities, but some of the slighly surprising seats it shows Labour as winning are indeed seats I think Labour are going to be close in if they're close to winning a majority: the Bournemouth seats, York Outer, Rushcliffe and so on.

It also shows Labour as doing surprisingly well in Scotland.

[YL]

I see there's a certain amount of predictable toy throwing from prams about the Colston statue jury verdicts.

[YL]

Meanwhile, partygate seems to be breaking out again.

[YL]

Anne Marie Morris MP (Newton Abbot) has had the Tory whip removed for voting with Labour on this motion yesterday.

[YL]

The LibDems are the party of Gladstone and Asquith just with Democrats as a suffix. The ex-Labour element was never that essential.

I'm not sure why you're saying this now, but I basically agree: the SDP people who remained in the merged Lib Dems long term were generally those who would have been comfortably in place in the old Liberals.  In particular it's not generally the case that it's the ex-Labour elements on the left of the modern party and the ex-Liberal elements on the right.

(Though I think there could be a debate to be had about how much the Liberal Party of Thorpe and Steel resembled that of Gladstone and Asquith, and not just because neither of the latter ever got accused of hiring a hitman.)

[YL]

The Tories in London will be particularly worried as councillors are generally the only people who they can get to canvass- it would be interesting to look at the membership data in some areas that were once areas of strength e.g. Chiswick, Richmond, Putney, Croydon.

I’m unsure re the new boundaries but a good General election for labour could be an absolute bloodbath for the Conservatives in outer London.

If you enter that YouGov poll into Electoral Calculus and select the new boundaries, then Labour gains in London compared with Electoral Calculus's notionals are:

Beckenham
Chingford & Woodford Green
Croydon East
Croydon South
Eltham & Chislehurst
Finchley & Muswell Hill
Fulham & Chelsea West
Hendon & Golders Green
High Barnet & Mill Hill
Stanmore & Edgware
Uxbridge & South Ruislip
Westminster & Chelsea East

Oh, and the Lib Dems win Wimbledon and both Sutton seats.  So yes, pretty bad for the Tories in outer London (seven seats left, mostly on the Kent and Essex fringes) and a complete wipeout in inner London.

(Full figures are Lab 313, Con 234, SNP 55, LD 24, Plaid 2, Green 1, Other 1 (Exmouth), so Labour just short of a majority.  Take with a pinch of salt.)

[YL]

According to the Independent, Johnson has a cunning plan...

... to save his own skin by getting various officials to take the blame for partygate and resign.  Apparently it's called "Operation Save Big Dog".

[YL]

I think I have a hunch but why are so many members of Living Marxism now conservatives?

They were already functionally on the Right (in a libertarian sort of way) 20 or more years ago.

[YL]

What do we think happens next if the letters come in, but Johnson fairly narrowly wins the confidence vote?  (Say about 200 to 160.)

[YL]

https://twitter.com/electpoliticsuk/status/1483547353495842817?s=21
It has began.

Small but significant chance that he wouldn't contest such a vote. Especially if prominent cabinet members publically turned against him.

Thatcher famously won the first round in 1990 but not enough to win the contest outright; she did not contest the second.

Back then the rules said that to win outright in the first round a candidate had to be clear of the field by 15 percentage points.  Thatcher didn't achieve that, so there would be a second round; supposedly she was then told that people would switch sides and she would lose.

That doesn't, in principle, apply now.  Johnson could win the confidence vote by one vote and that would be it if he really wanted to stay on, though it's hard to see anyone as a credible PM in those circumstances.

[YL]

That has to be the weirdest thing I've ever seen in British politics.

If he became an independent I could understand but to actually join Labour? Truly bizarre.

I wonder how the Corbynistas online will react.

It happened in 1995 and 2007- although iirc both those MPs were old hands. His seat has a large Jewish population and he’s chair of the APPG- and his statement mentioned anti-Semitism.

There were actually several between those dates: Alan Howarth in 1995, Shaun Woodward in 1999 (who was a first term MP at the time, like Wakeford), Robert Jackson in 2005 and Quentin Davies in 2007.  Also there was Peter Temple-Morris, but he was expelled from the Tories by William Hague and later joined Labour.

[YL]

It’s starting to look as if Wakeford’s defection and Davis’ intervention may in fact have been counterproductive as regards the prospects of a no confidence vote in Johnson. More MP’s seem to be rallying to the PM.

Would Wakeford have defected if he'd thought the threshold was about to be reached?  As he actually went the whole hog and went to Labour rather than just becoming an Independent, perhaps he was going to go anyway, but it seems odd timing.

Of course nobody really knows what's going on with the letters except the member for Altrincham & Sale West.

[YL]

Rumoured defections don't have the best track record.  But who might be some "Red Wall" Tories Labour might take?  Not Lee Anderson, surely...

(Not that Bury South, Tory from 1983 to 1997, is exactly "Red Wall" in the usual sense of that cliché.)

[YL]

I wonder how many letters had actually been submitted before that rumour the 54 letter threshold had been reached appeared on Tuesday evening.  Before that, the view seemed to be that it wouldn't happen until Sue Gray's report.

I'm still a bit surprised Wakeford said he'd submitted one.  I'd have thought that if he'd made up his mind to defect, as it appears is the case, he'd have kept his head down before the announcement.

[YL]

It should be noted that the Liberal Democrats are already a merger between a liberal party & a social democratic one; and this was a complex & painful process for the party which was still causing issues 20 years later.

I'm not very familiar with the history of Lib Dems, but didn't most SDP people slowly return to Labour during Kinnock's leadership?

Well, the SDP were a bit of a mixed bag, but in general those who were less of a natural fit with the Liberals either drifted back to Labour in the Nineties or otherwise didn't remain in the Lib Dems, and of course some of their most high profile figures never joined the Lib Dems in the first place.  So I think that the Lib Dems are essentially the continuation of the old Liberal Party and that ideological tensions in the party aren't to do with the merger.

[YL]

Question: How bad had the landscape and new boundaries screwed Labour? Back in ‘97 Labour got 43% and the Conservatives got 31%. Then in ‘01 Labour got 41% and Conservatives 32%. Those resulted in a massive landslides of 418 seats and 412 seats or 172 seat majority and then 164 zest majority

How many polls show similar percentages of the vote - some even more in Labour favor but the seat projections put them with a modest amount of seats. I even saw one poll that gave Labour a 6 point lead on the Conservatives and then finishing 20 short of a majority.

Does the SNP dominance basically make it very hard for Labour to form a majority government unless it’s a massive historical landslide?

This isn't a bad question, but we don't really know.  It's true that most seat modellers predict that Labour need a really quite substantial lead to win even a small majority, but seat modellers aren't that sophisticated and if there's a big swing they may get the details wrong.  Indeed if you work based on Uniform National Swing and take the Tories down into the low 30s then the Tory share would go negative in some constituencies.  The Electoral Calculus method avoids this but does still take the Tory share implausibly (IMO) low in some urban constituencies (which means few wasted Tory votes in these places, whereas Labour have a lot of wasted votes in safish Tory seats).

I suspect that if there's a big swing it will be lower in safe Labour seats in the cities (where the Tories generally don't have that far to fall) and also in many safe Tory seats in the countryside and the wealthy commuter belt (where there are just fewer potential Labour voters) and so it will be a bit bigger in intermediate areas, including marginals, and so Labour will do a little better than the models would predict.  But there is no guarantee of that.

(On the subject of safe Tory seats swinging too much, I note that the current Election Maps UK "nowcast" -- one of the less implausible looking seat modellers based on current polling AFAICT -- has Labour coming within 7 percentage points in Tatton while narrowly failing to win a majority.  Seriously?)

Close to an election we will probably get some decent MRP modelling which gives a better idea of where (if anywhere) is swinging.

[YL]

I used to find it somewhat embarrassing that she was a Member of Parliament.

[YL]

As I said last week, the Tory party is not as cutthroat as they like to say they are

Yes, their fabled "ruthlessness" is somewhat mythologised.

Its basically built on two episodes - Thatcher's fall (its almost written out of history now that she was a literal handful of MPs away from winning re-election, and would surely have managed that but for her utterly abysmal "campaign manager") and IDS - well, nuff said really

I suppose there's also Heath's fall in 1975, but he had lost two or three General Elections (depending on what you mean by "lost") by that point.