This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

[CumbrianLefty]

Bob Neill, longtime chair of the Commons Justice Committee, has announced his retirement at the next election. Not much trivia for him, beyond some odd expenses stuff. The 2006 by-election that brought him to the Commons was interesting though - 600 vote majority in an otherwise safe Tory seat over the Lib Dems, with a young Rachel Reeves in fourth place behind an up-and-coming Nigel Farage

Reeves also stood for the seat in the 2005 GE, she is a native of that area.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Tamworth might be close as well.

Decent odds of winning back Mid Bedfordshire with the incumbent shifting over to Hitchin.

[YL]

Kwasi Kwarteng has announced that he will not be standing at the General Election. His Spelthorne (the part of Middlesex which wasn’t included in Greater London and was thus transferred to Surrey in the 1960s; Staines and so on) seat should be pretty safe barring a real collapse (it stayed Tory through the Blair years) so might be of interest to a few prominent people looking for a seat.

[Torrain]

Yeah, if they’re not winning Spelthorne, they must surely be at risk of falling below 100 MPs. Sounds like Lisa Townsend, the Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner is prepping for a run. She’s been shortlisted in other local seats, including Dorking & Horley, Esher & Walton, and was mentioned as a potential option for Reigate.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I think if he had ran again, there could have been a negative personal vote (I don't think we see them enough to swing a safe seat, but him and Truss are good candidates for swingable voters to show up and recoil at the name)

[WD]

This nowcast (https://electionmaps.uk/nowcast#google_vignette) has it with a projected Labour majority of a little over 1K. Take from that what you will

[JimJamUK]

PopCon, yet another new Conservative movement/faction, was launched today. Despite being headlined by Truss, nothing exciting happened really. A few calls for unity followed by slagging off the government, but frankly pretty tame compared to the rest of the ‘Five Families’.

[Torrain]

A slighly chaotic affair - two of the four founders (and keynote speakers) left before the official launch today. Simon Clarke was booted for starting his open campaign to remove Sunak (rather than an underground one), and Ranil Jayawardena walked away last night, with a public letter denouncing their disruptive approach.

Which of course left the duty of MC'ing the event to those two bastions of national popular opinion - Truss and JRM.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Spelthorne is one of a few constituencies that only once voted Labour, in 1945 on an unusually large majority. And like Uxbridge it's one of the few constituencies that has elected a Labour MP but never a Whig/Liberal. A distinction found only in pockets of outer London and basically all of Liverpool.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Spelthorne is one of a few constituencies that only once voted Labour, in 1945 on an unusually large majority. And like Uxbridge it's one of the few constituencies that has elected a Labour MP but never a Whig/Liberal. A distinction found only in pockets of outer London and basically all of Liverpool.

The 1945 Spelthorne included Feltham, Yiewsley and West Drayton and on those lines would have voted Labour on a number of other occasions. I'm not sure if on the present lines it would have voted Labour in 1945 - that would depend upon the relative distribution of population within the constituency at the time.

Would also say that the distinction of never having elected a Liberal applies to most borough seats which didn't exist before 1918.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Spelthorne is one of a few constituencies that only once voted Labour, in 1945 on an unusually large majority. And like Uxbridge it's one of the few constituencies that has elected a Labour MP but never a Whig/Liberal. A distinction found only in pockets of outer London and basically all of Liverpool.

The 1945 Spelthorne included Feltham, Yiewsley and West Drayton and on those lines would have voted Labour on a number of other occasions. I'm not sure if on the present lines it would have voted Labour in 1945 - that would depend upon the relative distribution of population within the constituency at the time.

Would also say that the distinction of never having elected a Liberal applies to most borough seats which didn't exist before 1918.

Should've been clearer, I meant the territory never elected a Liberal under previous seats too.

[CumbrianLefty]

Which of course left the duty of MC'ing the event to those two bastions of national popular opinion - Truss and JRM.

Truss was comical as ever, even if unintentionally, but JRM was downright sinister. He is a significantly nastier person than his often somewhat comic persona suggests.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Spelthorne is one of a few constituencies that only once voted Labour, in 1945 on an unusually large majority. And like Uxbridge it's one of the few constituencies that has elected a Labour MP but never a Whig/Liberal. A distinction found only in pockets of outer London and basically all of Liverpool.

The 1945 Spelthorne included Feltham, Yiewsley and West Drayton and on those lines would have voted Labour on a number of other occasions. I'm not sure if on the present lines it would have voted Labour in 1945 - that would depend upon the relative distribution of population within the constituency at the time.

Would also say that the distinction of never having elected a Liberal applies to most borough seats which didn't exist before 1918.

Should've been clearer, I meant the territory never elected a Liberal under previous seats too.

OK, but that's just plain wrong. Uxbridge was created in 1885, prior to that the area was part of the Middlesex seat which regularly elected Liberals/Whigs.

[TheTide]

Quite an 'interesting' PMQs, or at least one moment during it was.

[Torrain]

His spokesperson has refused to apologise and defended the language as 'legitimate'. They're doubling down.

Between that £1k deportation bet with Piers Morgan, and now that PMQs moment, making that jibe directly in front of Brianna Ghey's mother, he's just stumbling from one callous gaffe to another.

Forget the polls narrowing, if this is the quality of his in-the-moment political instincts, the election is going to be a genuine car crash.

*

On a separate note, bit moved by Elliot Colburn's (unrelated) intervention on mental health. Important stuff, that's still hard to navigate sensitively.

[Wiswylfen]

Simon Clarke was right: they need to get rid of him. It's not going to win them the election, but I think they can still make it 150-180 seats. "He's prone to saying stupid things under the lightest of questioning, OK?" is not the argument some seem to think it is. The man really is going to collapse in a campaign--which will neatly distract from Starmer being boring.

[afleitch]

Getting rid of him is the worst possible outcome for the Tories, so they absolutely should do it.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

What’s the record for most prime ministers in one parliamentary term?

[EastAnglianLefty]

Getting rid of him is the worst possible outcome for the Tories, so they absolutely should do it.

I think there are Tory MPs who would be a big enough improvement that it would justify the hit to the image of the party that junking another leader would cause. But if they junked him they'd replace him with Badenoch, who would be worse.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

What’s the record for most prime ministers in one parliamentary term?

4, as far as I know, which has happened about three times, most recently in 1865 (Palmerston died, was replaced by Lord Russell, who was defeated by a VONC, which returned Derby to power for the eight hundredth time, who stepped down for medical reasons in favour of Disraeli - of course that parliament actually accomplished something (the Reform Act) unlike the current shower )

[Torrain]

Want to buy a beer for whichever SPAD decided the Tories new PPB should be Sunak sadly drawing a house on a flipchart. Bonus points for creating a new meme template in the run up to the election.

[CumbrianLefty]

Utterly predictably there are Unherd types trying to tell us that was clever and smart, actually.

[Yeahsayyeah]

What did he try to Express with this drawing?

[Blair]

They keep saying ‘labour will take us back to square one’ and while they have obviously been told by some overpaid focus group that it’s a great line it does seem very weird as no-one thinks the country and the public realm is better than it was in 2010.

[Torrain]

Nickie Aiken, MP for the Cities of London and Westminster (and one of about eight Deputy Chairmen of the Conservative Party) is standing down at the election. First elected in 2019, in that mad three-way contest with newly-minted Lib Dem Chuka Umunna and Labour pushed into third. Aiken's husband works in the Cabinet Office, and apparently a plum job opportunity for him overseas clinched the retirement.

Aiken won a 3.9k majority over the Lib Dems, but it's looking like a lock for Labour next time around, with the boundaries looking more favourable for them, and no 'celebrity' third party challenger.

Also worth noting - there’s reporting in PoliticsHome suggesting the retirements are being staggered to minimise political impact (with CCHQ preferring a trickle rather than a stampede).