Seeing Skinner go down would be a Portillo moment though.
The thing about that was that Portillo was a high profile cabinet minister, widely understood to be on the cusp of launching a leadership bid. He was also thought to be safe enough, that area being very different twenty two years ago (yes we're old) to what it is like today.
Whereas the potential loss of Bolsover has been heavily trailed across the media for months. And, bluntly, while Skinner used to be one of Labour's highest profile backbenchers, on the telly all the time, these days he is not. I suspect that a lot of people would be surprised to find he was still around and still running for election.
But in the end this sort of thing does not matter. Michael Portillo is, I gather, doing fine now. So is Ed Balls.
Agreed. If there's going to be a Portillo moment in this election the likely candidates for it are Dominic Raab, Ian Duncan Smith, or maybe Steve Baker. If a Labour landslide was on the offer Jacob Rees-Mogg might be on that list.
Of course, the ultimate candidate would be Boris Johnson himself. If he lost his seat I think we'd have to rename the whole idea as the 'Boris Moment' or something.
