Categories
There’s certainly no herding on today’s MRPs – politicalbetting.com
There’s certainly no herding on today’s MRPs – politicalbetting.com
Seat projections from the new MRP poll for @Telegraph Labour 516Tories 53Lib Dems 50SNP 8Plaid 4Reform 0This suggests the Lib Dems are in touching distance of becoming the official opposition.
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Sunak's protection officer investigated for alleged election date bets
A police officer working as part of the prime minister's close protection team has been suspended and later arrested over alleged bets about the timing of the general election, the BBC can reveal.
The Metropolitan Police were contacted by the Gambling Commission last Friday, who informed the force that they were investigating alleged bets made by a police constable from its Royalty and Specialist Protection Command.
The Met has told the BBC that "the matter was immediately referred to officers in the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards, who opened an investigation, and the officer was also removed from operational duties".
The officer was then arrested on Monday on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He was taken into custody and bailed pending further enquiries.
The matter has also been referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
The Met said the Gambling Commission continues to lead the investigation into the alleged betting offences, "and our investigation is running in parallel to that".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cgeekd4nzvkt
And even with the SNP declining it feels odd to think they could hold onto up to 6 seats in Scotland - might there be a possibility of complete reversal with Unionist vote going Lab or LD, even if currently nowhere, if the national polling is this bad?
Amazing, really.
Labour: 28 seats
SNP: 20
Conservatives: 5
Lib Dems: 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a05xU5Am8s
I spoke to a (Green) friend on Monday and we ended up discussing politics. He was really looking forward to seeing the Tories botted out and was totally unconcerned by right wing populism and saw no reason not to be contemptuous of them because:
a) The clear majority of people support progressive parties
b) Tory/Right wing voters are old and dying
c) You can't control migration anyway so it's all a waste of time
I tried to dissuade him from this optimistic view and urged more scepticism but he wasn't having it.
"Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Kenneth Galbraith"
High Labour score and (relatively) high Tory score = moderate majority
Lower Labour score, even below 40% and very low Tory score = wipeout
I am much more inclined to believe the polls showing mid to high 20s or nudging 30 for the Tories, which is why I don;t think the majority will be anywhere near as huge as polls are currently showing. And I think the Lib Dems will be comfortably down in 3rd or 4th place (I also think SNP will do much better than predicted due to unionist tactical unwind).
Back from a pleasant lunch to MRP chaos - why am I not surprised?
This election is going to be a real test of MRP methodologies - to be fair, we are still more than two weeks out for all some people have already started voting by post. Plenty of time for change.
I suspect nothing will be left to chance by either Conservative or Labour that money cannot buy so we'll see an avalanche of social media campaigning and ground work in the final seven days.
Musing on this sitting by the Thames this afternoon (and not by my end of the river) I thought if Labour are going to gain up to 250 seats that will be formidable. It took the Conservatives from 2001 to 2019 to add 200 seats to their total yet Labour look set to do more ij one election.
IF the Conservative vote is down by half or more than half in some places there will be some incredible results and swings - 25% or more in some seats. The LDs have a problem - the resources they have put in to 30-40 seats is one thing - can they move into the next 20-30 this late in the campaign and nick these? To this observer, it seems the Conservatives have abandoned the battle against Labour (lost) and are now concentrating on surviving in up to 100 seats against the LDs.
I imagine the LDs will look at areas of local council strength and see if this can be built on in the next fortnight.
It is, I would argue, the biggest opportunity for political realignment since the foundation of the SDP (once might argue had IDS remained Conservative leader in 2005, another opportunity might have arisen) in 1981 - Davey may as well throw caution to the proverbial and send the activists into other seats - 40 seats and third place is one thing, the possibility of 60-70 seats AND being His Majesty's Loyal Opposition would be a transformative event.
I still think the Tories will be at the 100-120 range, but I do think Sunak will lose his seat - Reform and even average Tories want the party out, and they hate him.
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1803457499556618660
A shame we don't have village level data like you can get for French elections, but still. It's so geographically regionalised. Reform clinging to the East, Lib Dem yellow all over Wessex, Plaid dominating the Western edge of Wales, and the pattern of Tory seats in Scotland, all coterminous with each other in 2 big blobs.
If we get something like that in the actual election I look forward to the historical geography threads on twitter from the likes of Francois Valentin.
I didn’t say it’s untrue (who, other than you and your interlocutor knows ?) - and certainly there seems to have been a recent big tactical reversal.
But it is undeniably Sunil-esque.
If the Conservative vote collapses by half and the LD vote remains constant or goes up as a result of tactical voting, Davey won't complain.
There will be hundreds of seats where the LD vote remains static or declines in the face of Labour, Reform or Green advancing but that tranche of Con-LD seats is what matters, not the bigger picture.
As OGH always told us, it's about bums on benches not vote share.
Is there nothing the Tories can do to somehow call off Farage and mitigate the threat? Its surely in both their interests not to completely eviscerate any meaningful representation and voice for non Left wing MPs? It's one thing for the Left to win, another to have 40% of the electorate completely unrepresented in Parliament.
For the record i have always been receptive to some form of more proportional representation in the Commons, not just now.
I also see Tewkesbury reported by PtP as "a sea of gold" still stays in the Blue column. Could happen of course, but with the momentum with the Lib Dems at the moment, that also sounds rather off, especially if seats like Surrey Heath are showing as a Lib Dem gain.
People tend to be much more polite on camera, especially if they think they're being broadcast, then they will be in the privacy of the voting booth.
I think Sunak will keep his seat.
It will be enough to keep the Tories going, but the result is going to make it really hard for them to meaningfully rebuild. Because a lot of second places are going to be ceded to Reform. And the LDs are going to become entrenched and really hard to shift in the South. And that is why, eventually, Con and Ref are going to have to come to some kind of arrangement, whatever that looks like.
So they effectively say (through multiple regression rather than blind supposition), "What a 30 year old female professional in Guildford will do is quite predictive of what like a 32 year old female professional in Chelmsford will do, and reasonably predictive of what a 40 year old professional man in Wells will do, but much less so of what a 78 year old retired manual labourer in Rhyll will do".
When you get to Orcadians, it's not terribly clear that many of the sample will be that similar to them - there are quite a lot of people who are reasonably similar to the 30 year old professional woman in Guildford, but Orcadians are outliers in more ways than one.
I may be proved totally wrong when it's chalked up as an SNP gain on 5th July... but it feels like a case of these things being a bit dodgy, at least at the margins where constituencies and the people in them are somewhat dissimilar to the bulk of the UK.
Fascinating study with young adult volunteers who hadn't previously had Covid.
An unprecedented look in terms of detailed response to infection.
Human SARS-CoV-2 challenge uncovers local and systemic response dynamics
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07575-x
The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global health threat, yet our understanding of the dynamics of early cellular responses to this disease remains limited1. Here in our SARS-CoV-2 human challenge study, we used single-cell multi-omics profiling of nasopharyngeal swabs and blood to temporally resolve abortive, transient and sustained infections in seronegative individuals challenged with pre-Alpha SARS-CoV-2. Our analyses revealed rapid changes in cell-type proportions and dozens of highly dynamic cellular response states in epithelial and immune cells associated with specific time points and infection status. We observed that the interferon response in blood preceded the nasopharyngeal response. Moreover, nasopharyngeal immune infiltration occurred early in samples from individuals with only transient infection and later in samples from individuals with sustained infection. High expression of HLA-DQA2 before inoculation was associated with preventing sustained infection. Ciliated cells showed multiple immune responses and were most permissive for viral replication, whereas nasopharyngeal T cells and macrophages were infected non-productively. We resolved 54 T cell states, including acutely activated T cells that clonally expanded while carrying convergent SARS-CoV-2 motifs. Our new computational pipeline Cell2TCR identifies activated antigen-responding T cells based on a gene expression signature and clusters these into clonotype groups and motifs. Overall, our detailed time series data can serve as a Rosetta stone for epithelial and immune cell responses and reveals early dynamic responses associated with protection against infection...
Fieldwork for this model began after we had received and were able to programme in the actual candidates standing in each constituency into our survey. This means every respondent saw the specific names and parties of everyone standing in their specific constituency.
By mimicking the ballot in this way, we are able to pick up extra information such as incumbency effects, patterns of party contests, what happens when high profile independent candidates intervene in local races, and what voters tend to do when their first-choice party is unavailable.
Write up on the More In Common MRP https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/general-election-2024/mrp-19-june-2024/
We’ve also made some changes to align with those made to our headline voting intention where we now ask the public to choose who they will vote for based on the candidates who will be on the ballot paper in their constituency come polling day, and in this MRP model we use the same voter turnout methodology as we do in our updated headline voting intention.
Other updates to the model itself include the work we’ve done to examine additional factors that are predictive of voting intention to help improve the accuracy of our estimates.
Our first model included data collected before and after the announcement of the General Election date. This new model includes only data from after the short campaign began, in which we ask respondents a series of tactical voting questions to better understand who might vote tactically and where. As such, we now include data about tactical voting in our model.
MRPs have performed well in recent elections, but current polling suggests record levels of proportionality in swing patterns for some seats, taking these models beyond historic election cycles where MRPs have accurately predicted results. To account for this and to avoid extreme values that go beyond proportional swing, we have developed a proportionality check to adjust our posterior predictions and bring them closer to historical swing patterns.
Write up of the Savanta MRP https://savanta.com/knowledge-centre/view/savantas-first-mrp-of-election-campaign-predicts-labour-on-for-majority-of-382/
MRP estimates individual seat outcomes based on respondents’ current voting intention, during the fieldwork period outlined. The estimates therefore remain a ‘nowcast’ and not a ‘forecast’, and as such, with still time to go in the election campaign, voter intentions may still change. The MRP results are in some respects a result of the ‘classic polling’ figures that make-up the model and can be susceptible to small national vote share changes having a notable impact on the seat counts.
The fieldwork for this MRP was conducted before Savanta moved to a ballot-prompt method and is therefore a product of our ‘standard’ prompting principles.
The former prime minister Boris Johnson is not expected on the campaign trail between now and polling day on 4 July.
As first reported in The Times, external, his team insist he isn’t going on holiday instead of campaigning.
They say he has done what party headquarters have asked him to do, such as social media videos.
When he was asked whether Mr Johnson would be joining him on the campaign trail, in an interview with Nick Ferrari on LBC, Rishi Sunak avoided answering.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce55krn6lrzo
All these newfound converts to PR now they realise they’re in for a beating.
There is nothing Sunak can now do to bring back Reform voters, no. And don’t assume they are coming back after the election either.
But let’s wait and see just how well Reform do. They may poll lower than the LibDems.
Received wisdom was that would be so calamitous to Tory prosoects as to be unthinkable but is that now the only throw of the dice left?
What's interesting is no one else was even in a moderately close second place until 2015.
This is on top of the earlier £75k
Joey Barton will pay a further £35,000 in damages to settle a libel claim with Jeremy Vine, the broadcaster's solicitors have confirmed.
The Radio 2 presenter sued Mr Barton earlier this year, after the former footballer wrote a series of posts suggesting Mr Vine had a sexual interest in children.
In May, the High Court ruled that Mr Barton's posts were defamatory. On Tuesday, the sportsman apologised and agreed to pay £75,000 in damages and legal costs.
But Mr Vine later said the payment was "not the final outcome" of the case.
In a statement, external, his lawyers said Mr Barton would pay a further £35,000 for posts published after Mr Vine took legal action.
"Mr Barton responded to being served with Mr Vine's claim by making additional damaging and untrue publications about Mr Vine and his legal complaints," wrote Judith Thompson of Samuels Solicitors.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjeev9g5745o
And it’s usually shambolic. Look at countries with coalitions.
Anyway, we had the chance to change the voting system 12 years ago and the British people voted decisively by 2:1 to keep it.
I tell you what though. I’ll agree to a voting referendum if you give me a referendum on the other two referenda we’ve held of late: Scottish Independence and Brexit.
Otherwise, no.
The long game he has always excelled in demands destruction and then hostile takeover of the Tories. Not even sure if he wants to be head. Just a kingmaker.
Just typing this makes me feel queasy.
The Tories, however, cannot do so.
We remain steadfast in our support for the fundamental principles that underpin the UK’s constitutional settlement. We remain committed to the First Past the Post system for elections, maintaining the direct link with the local voter.
Scotland need Germany to also give Hungary a bit of a hammering but that is looking a bit unlikely. Everything turns on tonight's match. Scotland need to win. It is quite difficult to think about anything else.
Labour’s vote share is holding up pretty solidly at the moment whilst the Conservatives aren’t gaining as I thought they might.
Caesar's wife etc.
I mean from my own personal experience back in the run up to GE2015 I was about to back the Tories some more to win most seats and was about to bet a decent amount on it but ComRes sent me an embargoed poll which said the Tories were doing better in the marginals so I decided not to make that bet until the poll became public.
The price moved but I am glad I stuck to my principles.
"I am actually the PM and I have a plan that I am sticking to... and if, heaven forbid, I don't win then these are the broad contours of how we'll oppose Labour on tax etc" is clearly not a wildly popular sales pitch but it is a sales pitch and some people will go for it.
If they have no leader, no idea who will lead, and in many respects no programme (because the manifesto is to a fair degree Sunak's supposed plan), what is the sales pitch even at that point? There would then seem to be very little to prevent any remaining moderates from peeling off to LD/Labour, and the right from saying, "Well, at least Nigel over there, even if I'm not a massive fan, is standing for something and saying a few attractive things".
Not going to happen, anyway.
Difficult to see that, based on the CPS guidelines. How could the man have been "acting as a public officer" when he placed the bet, I wonder?
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/601bec27e90e0711cc85dd91/Misconduct-in-public-office-WEB11.pdf
Or elsewhere that I can find as a layman.
Must be somewhere in the case law, you would think, though.
Farage refusing to rule out switching to the Tories if he wins in Clacton .
That feels a stretch as the statute refers to "interference" or "deception". It isn't likely to be "interference" if someone passively receives information (it could be if Sunak himself bet as he actually calls the election). And I also struggle with "deception" in this context as I don't know where you'd draw the line between a hot tip and insider information. I can see how a lawyer would make the case, but suspect a court would prefer to define "deception" in quite a tight manner.
Do we really want somebody in that position who at worst is prepared to make money from ethically dubious methods?
It looks like he will probably win Clacton, so he will be in the Common, likely with a couple of Reform colleagues
How low do the Tories have to go to be mentally susceptible to Farage as leader?
I reckon if they are sub 100 seats and if Sunak loses his seat, and if Reform are within five points of the Tory vote percentage. That's the point at which the Tories will be in psychological meltdown, facing oblivion, and may turn to Farage in desperation
Am I wrong?
One thing the disreputable often do is try to emphasise a lack of criminality as if that means something is ok - someone might be acquitted of a crime but have behaved inappropriately for a position.
Great big high pressure squatting like a toad over British politics.
Highs in the mid 20s.
It will change.
The media seem to be giving him an easy ride as they want a lot of drama post GE to report on !
There is of course another group who would like the Tory party to be theirs and I am one of their voters. They also need the current shower to lose and be under no illusions in preparation for a new centre right party called the Conservatives.
This will be another baboon v badger fight. Again, it isn't going to be a borefest.
I think if the Tories are that low at least one of the leadership candidates will advocate merger/electoral pact with Reform.
The Members would probably vote for that (indeed, based on the probable election result a lot of Tory members will almost certainly have voted for Reform already), so that person would win.
Then it is down to what Farage would want to agree to it, which would be major policy agreements. I don't agree he would demand to become Leader right away, he wouldn't need to to gain effective control even with so few MPs, if the Tories agreed an alliance of some kind.
This group didn't go to University, has seen a lot of competition - leading to lower wages - from immigration, didn't benefit from the house price surge, and has now been sucker punched by the inflation that has followed Covid and the Ukraine invasion. They have few, if any, savings and work in a town or small city that has largely been left behind by globalisation. They are (relatively) socially conservative.
And they feel - not without reason - that they've been fucked by globalisation and by the fact that the Conservatives/LibDems/Labour all offer some shade of the same post-1979 consensus.
This is a sizeable bunch of voters, and Boris captured them in 2019, by promising to Get Brexit done and to Level Up their towns.
What they feel has happened instead is that Brexit hasn't reduced immigration of low skilled workers and Levelling Up was cancelled.
Hence: Reform.
I am not a lawyer but I imagine that he has been arrested on the grounds that ‘misconduct in a public office’ might include personally benefiting through bets placed from insider knowledge to which the public aren’t privy. So ‘misconduct’ rather than ‘insider trading.’ Financial gain is clearly encompassed by the offence though (see below links).
It’s a common law offence and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Innocent until proven otherwise of course.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/601bec27e90e0711cc85dd91/Misconduct-in-public-office-WEB11.pdf
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/misconduct-public-office#:~:text=Misconduct in public office (“MiPO,of the public office held.
@rcs1000