What if the polls are true? What if the Conservatives are on course not just to lose the traditionally Labour seats in the Red Wall won in 2019, as well as the mid-sized towns that usually constitute marginal seats, but also lose large numbers of constituencies that have previously been thought of as safely Conservative? What if the Blue Wall – consisting of traditionally Conservative seats in the greater south-east of England – is about to fall? It is a question that Conservative MPs are increasingly asking themselves as Labour’s poll lead stubbornly refuses to fall. Particular attention is always paid to multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) polling which takes a large national sample and then applies the results to reflect ...

Mairi McAllan is a woman of intriguing contrasts. At just 31, having only been a Member of the Scottish Parliament since 2021, she has one of the toughest and most expansive jobs in the SNP government, as the Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Net Zero and Energy. Despite this stellar ascent, she describes herself as “a reluctant politician”. Friends confirm this, saying she almost had to be press-ganged into standing by former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, for whom she was a special adviser. McAllan trained in the cut-throat world of corporate law, but also helped set up RebLaw Scotland in 2017, a movement that originated in the US with the aim of putting social justice at the heart of the legal ...

To lose one minister may be regarded as a misfortune – to lose two in a single week looks like carelessness. Or, more accurately, like inevitability. Hence the news on Tuesday (26 March) that the skills minister Robert Halfon would be joining the armed forces minister James Heappey in quitting his government role and standing down as an MP at the next election was greeted by the Westminster equivalent of a shrug. It was a regretful shrug, to be sure. Heappey and Halfon are both widely liked and respected ministers in their departments, and their resignation announcements prompted a wave of appreciative cross-party tributes. These are not troublemakers flouncing out of Rishi Sunak’s government in protest at his leadership in the ...

Lee Anderson’s recent defection to Reform UK was perceived by many Conservatives as symbolic of the fracture between their party and the voters it won for the first time in 2019. For some, the views represented by Anderson have become synonymous with working-class voters. But this mistaken characterisation of today’s working class is one of the many reasons that Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives look like they will lose the next general election. Writing in the Telegraph, Tory MPs Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger argued that Anderson’s defection is “a sad indictment of the failure of our party to listen to the voters who propelled us to victory four years ago”. This analysis promises to lock in the Tories’ strategy of pushing further and ...

The recent Wellingborough and Kingswood by-elections didn’t see a stunning share of support for Reform UK. It was the dramatic swings to Labour that were the story of the night. But Reform’s double-digit vote shares were, for the first time, in line with polling forecasts. Up to this point, the party had dramatically underperformed then. Myself and others dismissed their polling numbers as more phantom than fact because whenever the ballot boxes came out, Reform’s vote did not. Now, if the polls are to be believed, Reform will win two to three million votes at the next general election, if not more. Any MPs? Unlikely. Such is the reality of first-past-the-post and there is little evidence of concentrated organisation on Reform’s ...

The 25th anniversary celebrations – if that’s the right word – of the Scottish Parliament’s opening are under way.  Thursday saw three of the four living former first ministers appear at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms to talk about that quarter century and the events that led up to devolution.  Jack McConnell, Henry McLeish and Alex Salmond have perhaps little in common beyond the high office they held with varying degrees of success – they are certainly not friends. Nicola Sturgeon, the most recent ex-occupant of the post, was not in attendance. It struck me, as I considered the line-up, how Holyrood has failed to produce a cadre of wise old birds who have climbed to the top of the political ladder, either stepped or ...

Their noble lordships inflicted seven defeats on the government over the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda yesterday. “Even if flights take off, we’ll still fight the election on the economy.” That was how one government source described the Conservatives’ strategy to me last month. Nonetheless, they said, the government would press on with the Rwanda plan because it was the only way to stop people crossing the Channel. Last night’s series of defeats in the Lords means the government will not bring the bill back to the Commons until after parliament’s Easter recess, pushing the earliest take-off date to June. This matters because there is a large rump in the Conservative Party that thinks the route to re-election (or simply non-annihilation) ...

With Labour 20 points or more ahead, a general election likely within eight months and seemingly nothing remedying the situation, it would not be a surprise if the Conservative Party was inclined to panic. In terms of pure political survival, this is not necessarily irrational. The Tories panicked in 2019, put Boris Johnson into Downing Street and ended up with an 80-seat majority. In the past ten days, the conversation within the Conservative Party has got a little louder as to whether it should enter panic mode and remove yet another leader. The case for ousting Rishi Sunak is a straightforward one. His critics argue that the Tories are heading for defeat and that Sunak is losing popularity. He shows no ...