Best Of

Morning all

This week's YouGov:

Reform: 25% (+1)
Labour: 21% (+2)
Conservative: 17% (-1)
Green: 16% (-1)
Liberal Democrat: 14% (=)

From 25th - 26th January
Changes with 19th January

Not much change in all honesty.

Central mystery of our times.

If YouGov are right, Labour are doing perfectly adequately for a mid-term government, and all this Change The Leader stuff is a mixture of panic in the ranks and selfish ambition amongst the officers.

If FoN are right, Labour are in pretty deep doodoo.

It's all about how they collect and read their runes, and right now it's impossible to tell who is doing it right.

Feels right. There just isn't too much to be angry about at the moment. Self assessed folk have just paid their tax and everything's rumbling along. Starmer seems a safe pair of hands and giving Trump a mauling last week did him no harm and seeing him shoulder to shoulder with Macron and Carney is what people like to see

Meanwhile Kemi doesn't feel like the answer to anything. Losing so many colleagues isn't impressive even if they were from the bottom of the barell. To be spurned by a bunch of misfits doesn't fill the voters with confidence

Which leaves Farage..... If he could have played his hand any worse than last week I can't think how. It s not quantity of recruit he needs but quality and that's exactly what he failed to get. Watching him cavort with Braverman was not for the faint hearted.

It's starting to look like the tortoise and the hare. If he can navigate the next few months he should be done and dusted

On topic an excellent thread.

Thank God that electing a Labour government with a massive majority has meant we've left behind the endless instability and personality-based psychodramas of the Tory years.

How often have big majorities meant stability? Only Blair, Boris and Starmer in my lifetime - one out of three - so I will have to defer to others for the long view.

Thatcher and Blair certainly proved it

Oh dear - apparently I am old enough for a Senior Moment - forgetting Thatcher! Though I was a child at the time, I suppose.

How stable a government was the Thatcher one post 83? She faced the Miners’ Strike, the Westland affair, the abandonment of monetarism, a financial panic, the splits over Europe, the psychodramas of Howe, Heseltine and Lawson, and the poll tax.

Yes with hindsight we know she surmounted all but the last one, but it’s easy to be wise with hindsight and I doubt if it felt so stable at the time.

You're right; it didn't feel particularly stable at the time. In addition to your excellent list, we also had both unemployment and interest rates averaging around 10% for most of the 80s. I remember it vividly as quite a torrid time for many people.

The 1980s were completely feral.

'Loadsamoney' was a 'hero', IIRC.

The eighties was the crucible in which modern Britain was forged, for good or ill.

Morning all

This week's YouGov:

Reform: 25% (+1)
Labour: 21% (+2)
Conservative: 17% (-1)
Green: 16% (-1)
Liberal Democrat: 14% (=)

From 25th - 26th January
Changes with 19th January

Not much change in all honesty.

But worth noting that if YouGov is broadly correct recently - which of course is rather unknowable - nothing much at all can be said about General Election prospects as it is all too close.

It will be particularly interesting to see how the May elections fit in which which pollsters. It could quite informative. As the current situation ranges from 'Reform look unbeatable, extinction looms for the establishment' (Leon) to 'They are all bunched closely together with over 3 years to go and Reform are filling up with wasters' (me) there is a lot at stake, even more important than my pocket money.

On topic. Should I write off my bet on Bridget Phillipson as the next Labour PM (16/1)?

Yes, that bet is a Bridget too far, the deputy leadership contest showed how unpopular she is.

An alternative view might be the Deputy election was a proxy confidence vote on Starmer and so has limited forecasting value. Phillipson has been getting a lot of stick in the Telegraph for closing private schools but perhaps that is the sort of thing that might go down well with Labour members. She is also in the news this week for wanting to ban phones from classrooms.

As with Ed Miliband, you might not like what she is doing but at least she is doing something.