The Financial Times has an interview with Theresa May tonight. There does not seem to be a news line in it, and the article, by George Parker and Roula Khalaf, conveys a sense of how May’s campaign has been faltering. It is headlined: Theresa May limps towards the election finishing line. Here’s an excerpt.
Speaking to the FT at Derby County’s Pride Park football ground, she gives not an inkling that anything has gone wrong in the campaign or that any mistakes have been made, let alone any misgivings about her gamble in holding an election. Her critics argue that she is in denial. But Conservative strategists hope that, ultimately, her sense of calm will allow her to appear as the no-nonsense figure who emerged from the chaotic aftermath of last summer’s Brexit vote to stabilise the nation.
Mrs May, who had spent the day touring target Labour seats in the north and Midlands, is immaculately dressed in a grey pantsuit, and is wearing a large “power necklace”. When she speaks, her voice betrays a slight nervousness that her rhetoric tries very hard to hide.
“We stand at an historical moment of change for our country,” she says, looking out over the pitch. “The decision people take next week is a decision not just for the next five years but beyond those next five years in terms of the opportunities that will be available to us.”
One senior Tory MP said: “If we do win with an enhanced majority there will be a considerable sigh of relief.” A former Tory minister, fighting for re-election, said: “People don’t like the cult of personality and the apparent Stalinist control. The public can now see it and they don’t like it.”
As we wait for Question Time to start, it is worth having a look at these three charts, from Ipsos Mori’s June political monitor, out today. They encapsulate the story of the entire campaign.
1 - How Theresa May’s lead over Jeremy Corbyn has shrunk.
This chart is a bit confusing, but it is worth the effort, because it compares how leaders have been seen on the “most capable prime minister” rating going back to 2001. It shows how, at the start of the campaign, May’s lead over Corbyn was similar to Tony Blair’s over William Hague in 2001. Now Corbyn is closer to the prime minister than Ed Miliband was in 2015, or Michael Howard was in 2005.
Comparing the bottom red line (Blair in 2001 - 52%) with the bottom blue line (Hague in 2001 - 12%) gives Blair a net lead of 40 points. In 2005, Blair had a net lead of 19 over Howard. In 2010, David Cameron was ahead of Gordon Brown by four. Five years later Cameron was 21 points ahead of Miliband.
In April, May’s lead over Corbyn was 38 points. But now it is only 15.
Best PM ratings at elections from 2001. Photograph: Ipsos Mori
2 - Why May’s lead over Corbyn has shrunk.
It’s quite simple; her ratings have plummeted, and his have risen sharply. That’s because he’s run a very good campaign, and she has run a very poor one.
Leader ratings. Photograph: Ipsos Mori
3 - How the Tory lead has narrowed.
All the polls have shown the Conservative lead narrowing sharply, although there are still big differences in what they assess the lead to be. Ipsos Mori have it at five points.
State of the parties polling Photograph: Ipsos Mori
Election events like tonight rarely make any noticeable difference to the polls, but the challenge for Corbyn will be to try to ensure that the red line in the second chart keeps heading north. And May needs to stop the blue line sinking.
My colleague, Peter Walker, is outside the Home Office building in London, where Green party activists are holding a “dance party” in defence of freedom of movement.
And suddenly we have dancers! And a bubble machine! No music yet, but I'm hoping it's imminent. pic.twitter.com/567FHbmyZw
We have music! Police officer has arrived, but she took a selfie with the dancers and is now shuffling to the best. So no arrests imminent. pic.twitter.com/572HyKO12X
The Guardian’s leader has been published and it says unequivocally “Labour deserves our vote”, adding that the party’s election campaign under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership “might be the start of something big rather than the last gasp of something small”.
It casts what is labelled an “unnecessary election for which there was no appetite” as an opportunity to:
... begin unwinding a political project of isolationist policies that with Brexit has seeded a fear of the future; to dispense with an economy where chief executives’ pay races ahead while the poorer half of the population sees income fall; to jettison the Victorian idea that moral courage and enterprise could replace the state in securing people’s freedom from want, ignorance and disease.
It contrasts the performances of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn during the election campaign. The prime minister’s campaign has been “grimly negative and entirely joyless” and has exposed May as a “poor judge of campaign tactics”. While the Labour leader is not perfect, the editorial says he has “led a good campaign” and been “energetic and effective on the stump, comfortable in his own skin and in the presence of others. He clearly likes people and is interested in them. He has generated an unfamiliar sense of the possible; once again, people are excited by politics”.
The leader reads:
Our desire is for a Labour government, but our priority is to stop the Conservatives. All politics is local and there are unique dynamics in Britain’s 650 constituencies. The electoral script in Scotland is now plainly different and we will consider the options there in a separate editorial. Similarly, Northern Ireland has its own narrative. There are many reasons to vote Lib Dem, not least their campaign for membership of the EU’s single market and reform of the voting system. Likewise, the Green party – and the epoch-shaping concern over the environment – should not be dismissed. Our support for Labour does not mean a “progressive alliance” of like-minded parties should be discarded. It should be embraced as an idea, but one whose time has not come. To limit the Tories by tactical voting makes sense.
A song calling Theresa May a “liar” has reached number four in the charts less than a week before Britain goes to the polls.
Despite not being aired on any mainstream radio stations, Captain Ska’s Liar Liar GE2017 has shot up the official singles chart since its release last week.
Originally released in 2010 in response to the coalition government, the seven-piece band recorded a new version ahead of polling day next Thursday which includes samples from the prime minister’s speeches alongside the lyrics “she’s a liar liar, you can’t trust her, no no no”.
At one point, the track was thought to be close to beating pop superstar Justin Bieber to the number one spot.
The BBC and several other radio stations have chosen not to play it and Radio 1 confirmed it would not be played during the chart countdown as it may breach impartiality guidelines during the election campaign. A protest demanding it be played was organised for outside the BBC’s headquarters in central London on Friday afternoon.
YouGov hit the headlines earlier this week when it published the results of an election forecasting model suggesting we are heading for a hung parliament. The exercise uses something called multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) to try to predict results in every seats on the basis of data reflecting their demographic composition, using up-to-date polling data.
But YouGov is not the only pollster running an MRP model. Lord Ashcroft has got one, too, and has just released his latest weekly forecast. Here are the figures.
Election prediction. Photograph: Lord Ashcroft Polls
This week’s estimates from the Ashcroft Model suggest a narrowing of the Conservative majority, though still a comfortable victory for Theresa May. Our “combined probabilistic estimate”, in which we take the sum of each party’s win chances in all the seats in which it is standing, the model gives the Conservatives 355 seats (down from 396 last week), or a potential majority of 60.
However, the majority could be considerably better or worse than this for the Conservatives, depending on the pattern of turnout. Our model calculates three different results, depending on who actually shows up to the polls. If everyone who claims in our surveys to have voted in the EU referendum turns out next week, the number of Conservative seats could fall to 345, with 233 for Labour – an overall majority of 40. But such a surge fails to materialise and turnout is confined to those who actually cast their vote in 2015, our estimated Tory majority rises to 78. Updated vote share and win-chance estimates for each seat are available here.
It is important to remember that we are dealing with probabilities not predictions, and that the result could well fall either side of our central estimates. In the scenario where turnout matches that of 2015, the highest likelihood (35%) is of a Conservative majority between 60 and 79, with a one-in-four chance of a majority between 80 and 99 and a 12% chance of a majority of 100 to 119. But if everyone who says they are certain to vote actually does so, the biggest chance (35%) is of a Tory majority between 40 and 59.
My colleague Kevin Rawlinson is taking over now. I will be back to cover the BBC Question Time election special, featuring Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, which begins at 8.30pm.
The Political Studies Association has been surveying experts to find out what they think the election result will be and today they have published a report with their findings (pdf). There were 335 forecasts (by 280 politics academics, plus journalists, pollsters or “other”) and generally they were forecasting a virtual Conservative landslide.
Being academics, they produced two figures for the average Conservative majority forecast: 92 was the mean figure, but 110 was the median (the halfway point).
Here’s an extract from the report.
Just as with vote shares, the headline figures for our expert predictions concerning seats in parliament also suggest a big win for the Conservatives, although some 12% of respondents expected a net loss of seats for the Tories. On average they expected a majority of 92 but most, 59% of respondents, expected a Tory majority of 100 or more. Labour were expected to sink to their lowest number of seats since 1935, with an average prediction of 186 seats. Just 6% of our respondents expected Labour to match or increase their 2015 seat tally.
You can read the full document, with all the numbers, here (pdf).
But there are two reasons not to take these figures particularly seriously. First, most of those people were consulted before the Conservative manifesto was published, leading to the calamitous social care U-turn that has coincided with a sharp drop in the Tory poll lead.
And, second, the last two times the PSA conducted this exercise, the experts were wrong. They thought remain would win the EU referendum by 55% to 45%, and they thought the 2015 election would result in a hung parliament.
So why are they bothering? “The answer is that it is important to properly record and benchmark the predictions of those who analyse politics for a living – and understand those predictions more precisely,” the report says.
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