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There is some hope among Tory strategists and Sunak himself that a mixture of tax cuts and Sunak’s leadership will help the Tories do better at the general election than the current polls suggest. This is polling from Redfield & Wilton shows how risky that strategy could do. I suspect whilst Sunak polls better than his party, I suspect any positives Sunak has is being damaged by the huge negatives around the party. Sunak has made mistakes, such as keeping…

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The Tories paying the price for Brexit? We are so used to the Tories being the party that attracts big private donations that makes this political development stand out. It is a huge win for Starmer not just for the campaign cash that his party is getting but for the source and the reasons. The FT report notes that the big driver of this donation was Brexit and the Tories must hope that this is not the start of a…

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The local results came as quite the shock to those at the top of the Tory party, the weekend before the locals the Tory expectations management was for around 600 seat loses which means they were really expecting losses of somewhere around 400 to 500 seat losses so they could spin the result as better than the expectations/polls. The result was much more horrific for Sunak’s party. I’ll need some solid data rather than anecdata that shy switchers are actually…

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At the 2019 general election the Tories led Labour by 35% amongst voters who owned their homes and led Labour by 10% with mortgage holders, whilst this polling from Redfield & Wilton doesn’t split the between homeowners and mortgage holders it is pretty alarming for the Tories. Although it has recovered from the low point and rapid shift of the Liz Truss premiership cheering the fact the Tories are only trailing Labour by 1% with this demographic is as idiotic…

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The big UK political story concerns the effort by the COVID 19 inquiry into getting access to the WhatsApp accounts of leading politicians on what happened during the period when it was at its most rampant. YouGov’s poll on the issue featured about 61% saying that all messages requested should be provided against 25% saying the government should decide which of them are most relevant. I’ve featured the political breakdown of responses and as can be seen even Tory voters…

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Paul Waugh in the Indy has a good piece pondering why Sunak is going to such lengths to avoid scrutiny over what he was doing during lock-down. The mere fact that this is all going to court could suggests that there is something that he doesn’t want to be made public. This is from Waugh’s piece: What ought to worry the Prime Minister was the way his own reputation was openly mocked by the Question Time crowd, with many suggesting his trademark…

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It is quite something for a government to challenge via judicial review the use of legal powers exercised by an inquiry it set up, run by a judge it appointed, with terms of reference it drafted. Why? Two broad reasons: (1) The need not to impede good governance (do stop laughing) by disclosing Ministerial/civil service communications which the government thinks irrelevant. (2) Concerns about personal communications and the private life of governmental witnesses. This latter point features quite strongly in…

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