The Deputy Leadership proves a Bridget too far for Phillipson – politicalbetting.com
The Deputy Leadership proves a Bridget too far for Phillipson – politicalbetting.com
Very low turnout of 16% but clear win:Powell – 87,407Phillipson – 73,536
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I had a blacklist of utter roasters I despised through the Blair years. My favourite (least favourite) was Geoff Hoon. Time to remake that list. The hateful Lucy Powell and Reeves are first and second so far. Starmer might be third.
Continuity Sunak proceeds.
So a perfect time for a Starmer reset which he needs and of all the leaders he's the one who holds the stage
Starmer isn’t working.
As does she.
It's like no one cares.
Is Labour finished?
16% turnout? Even the Labour Party was yawning....
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/10/25/labour-deputy-leader-elected/
It is a disastrous end to a terrible week for the PM, which saw his party come third in a by election in a Senedd seat which had always elected Labour candidates before and which saw a Find Out Now poll put Labour third behind not only Reform but even the Conservatives as well
I don't. He's getting some sensible advice at last. His USP is now that of the leading three parties Labour are the anti racists. He just needs to keep on it. It's got Zack up to 16% with some polls.
In terms of raw votes, 95 000 voted in the Kemi-Bob face-off. Bottom line is that membership of political parties with a whiff of power has fallen off a cliff. Which is one of the reasons they are so rubbish these days.
* That probably applies to both Labour and the Conservatives.
I am not sure I want to coalesce around Zach Student -Politics so (Sir)EdIsCrapIsPrimeMinister it is then.
Just when Starmer demonstrates his facile incompetence, Boris Johnson rocks up to the COVID Inquiry as a reminder that things could be even worse.
Although Corbyn Labour had a huge membership and still lost two general elections as centrist swing voters couldn’t stand them
Let's see what happens when they have to run something.
While I'm at it, the recent Green party leadership election had a tadge under 25k votes, and RefUK have a one man, one vote system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Friends_in_the_North
I think he was entitled to a year and a half to find himself but now's the time to show what he's really like. He could do worse than folow the Mamdani playbook..
Surely it is now not a case of if Starmer falls, but when, and what no hoper replaces him. There seems to be plenty of left wing Trusses and Sunaks to throw their useless hats into the ring, but no pre-Iraq Tony Blairs.
I'm surprised that the Labour Party have not published the turnout and vote share of its actual members in the Deputy Leadership election.
Senior political journalists left to post only the "16% turnout" when actual member turnout might be 3x? that figure...
https://x.com/DamianSurvation/status/1982022897121042705
Anyway, so given that Wales has about 3m inhabitants, so 10k out of 3m is 0.3% Quite reasonable. And I think they do control a couple of County Councils..... Carmarthen, Gwynedd and Ynys Mon I think. IIRC Carmarthen has had it's share of 'stories' but the others have no more operational problems than anywhere else and less than some.
Caerphilly might question your Reform voting logic.
1. Remain would edge the referendum
2. the current government would get a 6 month-1 year honeymoon in the polls
3. we'd have got rid of Northern Ireland by now
4. Kamala 24 by the narrowest of margins
5. Boris would last a full term
6. the Ukraine war would be over by now
7. UK GE 2024 vote shares. I got the margin between Lab and Con almost exactly right, but grossly overestimated the proportion of the vote the top two would get and underestimated Reform's share. I got the GE 2019 shares pretty accurate though.
8. Truss would be more competent than she was
9. Cameron would win an absolute majority in 2010 (I remember meeting Kwasi Kwarteng just before the election and telling him that. He disagreed with me and turned out to be right)
10. Labour would be the largest party in a hung Parliament in 2015
I find auditing oneself in this way a good means of curbing the arrogance that can build up if you only remember your triumphs. I don't think there's a common thread there, and I've made plenty of accurate predictions to offset against them, but that's why, though I post on this site from time to time, I don't engage in the activity from which it gets its name ...
The median voter is someone between the very left of the Conservatives and the right of the Lib Dems. Like always.
(Doesn't mean that position is popular or correct, but it is where the median nearly always is.)
On cultural politics, perhaps Reform (but more likely Conservative) - particularly on migration. On economics/fiscal, possibly even as left as Labour.
But I was never a fan, so my opinion may be biased.
It certainly upends the narrative that high turnout = Reform landslide. It looks like there is an opposite and equal reaction in that scenario.
I thought a hung parliament in 2015, Remain edging a win and Theresa May grabbing a landslide - all amongst my biggest bloopers.
And that's before we get started on my disastrous record on US politics.
For a long time, the scruffbag shtick was part of his appeal- it signalled a lack of pomposity, and that can be attractive. It grated a bit when he was PM- you are the country's first citizen, show yourself and your country and your voters some respect, dammit. Now, he just looks and sounds decrepit.
I think it's the hair loss. It comes for many of us, but the last man to build so much of their brand out of their barnet was Samson.
But I agree, they could underperform UNS if they are seen as too marmite by the election.
As a proxy indicator, the 57% for Leave in Caerphilly is very similar to Brexit voting parts of the NW and NE (e.g. Durham, around Manchester etc). If Reform can't win there then they are restricted to places like Teesside, Essex etc
The difference is in Wales there is a credible left-wing alternative - Plaid.
As long as Farage wins most of the seats Boris won in 2019 he will likely still be PM and unless voters are willing to tactically vote for Labour to beat Reform not just Plaid and the LDs that will remain the case
Saturday obscurities of questionable value.
The population ratios of E:S:W:Ni are close to 28:3:2:1.
(That overestimates S and W a little, but is near enough.)
If not already posted:
https://www.rte.ie/player/onnow/66546216066
https://www.rte.ie/news/presidential-election/2025/1025/1540513-presidential-count/
https://www.rte.ie/news/presidential-election/results/#/national
No official results expected until the afternoon but tallies so far indicate an overwhelming victory for Catherine Connolly and a large number of spoiled ballots.
Dutch election is Wednesday and that should be it for the 2025 season, at least all the ones I'm following
Thanks & hope everyone is keeping well,
DC
I'm not sure how helpful the turnout figure is given the varied electorate, unless for comparison with itself.
I was in a TU for years and years, but viewed its usefulness as inversely proportional to the explicit political positions it took, and it all went a bit downhill after a mega-merger.
In cultural terms if you put Reform to the right of the Tories, then the median voter is perhaps voting Tory but with Reform just behind
"My Government's not working."
"Have you tried switching it on and off again to reboot?"
"Yes 50 times, it hasn't improved."
What do they think about Rufford Ford down your way? And how are you finding your local Reform UK Councillors?
(I'm no fan, especially of the £75k official Council budget for flag-wagging, but they seem to me to be on 2 out of 10 rather than Kent's 0.5 out of 10.)
Kinnock would probably have beaten Thatcher in 1992 though, only the more centrist Major got the Conservatives the win in 1992 having also scrapped Thatcher’s poll tax
I remember the number of people posting on here in 2006-7 that the Conservatives would never win again, and similarly in 2020 how the Conservatives would dominate until at least 2030. Perhaps I was lucky to learn a lesson early on - I had a friend who is one of those people who expresses everything with 110% certainty and never acknowledges another's opinion or any shades of grey. In 1990 I bet him £50 that Gulf War One would last less than a year. He thought it would last two. But it was the arrogance that he, knowing nothing about NATO weapons or anything boring like that, showed, that convinced me that, while I could be wrong, I would be more likely to be on the right side of that bet. Remembering how cocksure he was is always a good way to recall how uncertain the future is.
Come to think of it, he never paid up.
With interest, he probably owes me his pension by now ...
I had an interesting little conversation at the blood clinic yesterday with a 36 year old orderly, who went from talking about addresses to "why don't you have a local accent?", and I was explaining that I go back here longer than Agent Anderson. We were chatting about how private schools devastate local accents (imagine Davey saying "Eeeyup Duck") and it turned out he lived just around the corner from where Davey lived when young (aged under 5).
Clearly quite knowledgeable as he recalled Lord Frost (aka Frosty the "No" Man), who was at the same school around the same time. David Frost is really quite obscure these days.
I thought membership was circa 300k so presumably 700k union votes.
Any tally on spoilt ballots?
From my experience usually a few funny comments
It seems alienating your own supporters while doing nothing meaningful to win over anyone else isn't a winning strategy. However, after Sunak, didn't everyone know that anyway...
He turned around and smiled at me
Checking, the last round of voting when he became leader was between Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd, and John Major.
Of those three was John Major not the "not wet" one on the Right, being iirc the Chief Secretary to the Treasury?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_Conservative_Party_leadership_election
People expect them to be fortune-tellers, and right every time, but it's actually about knowing who and what to listen to and being good at calculating risk.
Caveat: some members will be living furth of Scotland and Wales, but of course that also applies to Tories etc outside the UK.
A very offline cousin sent this to fam group chat. This story is breaking containment.
https://bsky.app/profile/jakemgrumbach.bsky.social/post/3m3y25alw5c2l
In Scotland and Wales, with Lab and Con out of fashion, if you assume that (mostly) the LDs are not a prime position option, then it's easy: to vote against Reform - you vote SNP/PC. This is obvs what happened on Thursday.
The complicated bit is England. In about 100 seats you vote LD; simple. In the rest, to vote against Reform is extremely tricky. Is the Tory option simply Reformlite, or an alternative? Probably the former. How do you vote against Reform in a seat the LDs have never challenged in, the Tories are Reformlite and you don't like the government, Labour are in most places the incumbent, and you think the Greens are no better than Trotsky?
This will take some time for the pieces to fall into place. Either they fall in fragments and Reform can win with 30%; or momentum happens either towards one party (no obvious candidate) or an unacknowledged alliance of LD, Lab, Green with mass tactical voting.
My seat - Penrith and Solway is a lovely example. Currently Labour, huge notional swing, new boundaries, probably Toryish in normal times and would have been Tory before 2024, absolute Reform territory, LDs nowhere, Greens out of sight. Reform currently projected to win.
Where does the vote go of those who intensely dislike this government and Reform?
Even if she'd be no improvement over Biden, there certainly wouldn't have been the repeated "lets give Vlad another couple of weeks" nonsense.
As Def Sec, I'd view both John Healey and Ben Wallace as being far more serious figures.
This is Labours Liz Truss moment 😃
If we arrange people on a left-right scale, Reform get 29%, then Tories get 18%, so we’re 47% along. Next come the LibDems maybe, so the median voter is LibDem.