Oh, Canada
This week: the Tories continue to nail it; how did the Canadian provinces get their names; and something that isn’t a rabbit.
The pace of the campaign seemed, for a few days, to slow down: it was like we all realised simultaneously that, if things kept happening at this rate, none of us would make it to election day in one piece. So I didn’t produce a list of gaffes by, and bad news for, the Tories at the weekend. I just stayed in bed and groaned.
Things seem to be livening up again, though, so if you’ve been sensible enough to tune out, here’s what you’ve missed:
On Friday, a third Tory MP – Mark Logan, Bolton North East – defected to Labour. It’s a measure of how stuffed the Tories are that hardly anyone noticed.(Word is that, before the election was called, the big Tory failure Logan was meant to call attention to was the economy. He won’t be running again.)
Health secretary Victoria Atkins went on Laura Kuenssberg to announce plans for 150 new GP surgeries. Kuenssberg asked how this had fitted with the fact 450 had closed since 2013.
Kemi Badenoch did the Monday morning broadcast round, and managed to sound furious that journalists had the gall to ask her questions on not one but two radio stations.
Robert Largan, Tory MP for High Peak, launched new websites in red (“Labour for Largan”) and light blue (“Reform for Robert”), to appeal to all the many-definitely-real Labour and Reform supporters he’s met who say they’ll vote for him, even though until this week literally no other human beings had ever heard his name. Misleading the electorate is illegal, alas, so Largan is being investigated by the Derbyshire Police.
Party deputy chair Jonathan Gullis, meanwhile, has been explaining the existence of pictures which show him with a convicted heroin dealer.
Grant Shapps called Sam Coates live on Sky News, and was asked how he felt about the YouGov MRP showing him losing his seat. He hung up.
Rishi Sunak was campaigning in Henley – let’s just pause here to take a second to sit with the fact a Tory Prime Minister is bothering to campaign in Henley – when a boat filled with placard-wielding LibDems, complete with deputy leader Daisy Cooper, motored past live on camera. He didn’t notice.
Oh, and the Tories’ ran an election video in which the British flag was flying upside down.
So, it’s not looking great.1 A trio of MRPs have predicted a Tory seat haul of between 185 (worse than Labour in 2019, but better than the 165 the Tories won in 1997) and 66 (true wipeout territory). In a post for Comment is Freed on Tuesday, election data wunderkind Dylan Difford did a good job of explaining why, if you look at the fundamentals (best leader, trusted with the economy, and various other measures), there is every reason to think that polls putting Labour 20 points ahead may be correct, even if people don’t like the Labour Party.
Since then, though, two big things have happened. One was Tuesday night’s debate, in which snap polls showed the public thought that Rishi Sunak bested a surprisingly sluggish Keir Starmer by the narrowest possible margin (literally: 51 to 49). Starmer also failed to rebut the nonsense claim that independent civil servants had costed Labour’s plans a £2,000 per household until surprisingly late in the debate. All in all, it might have been said to have gone quite well for Sunak, except for the fact that
a) the same snap polls showed Starmer as stronger on every issue except for “actually being Prime Minister” (others suggested he’d won);
b) on Wednesday morning, the BBC reported a letter from the civil service essentially confirming that Sunak’s claims were bollocks, and immediately sent an alert to 7 million people;
c) nobody at this stage is minded to trust a single word he says anyway.
The more consequential thing for Tory fates happened at 4pm on Monday, when Nigel Farage told Richard Tice, caretaker leader of the “party” Farage literally owns most of, that he could sling his hook because he’d be taking over. He’ll also be standing in Clacton – where, if things go well for the party, he might even win. (The Essex seaside town is the only seat UKIP ever won at a general election: Tory defector Douglas Carswell held it for the party in 2015). If they go really well they might win a couple of other seats, too.
But they almost certainly won’t. Farage claims his ambition is to replace the Tories as the main right-wing party, much as Canada’s Reform party did after the Tories were wiped out in 1993. (I wrote about that election, and what lessons it held for Britain today, here.) That election, though, saw Reform win 52 seats, the equivalent of around 115 in the British Parliament. I’m as terrified of the worst case scenario as the next guy – but Reform remains a one man band, and the man in question is not especially popular outside the hardline right, which is why he got a milkshake chucked over him at his own campaign launch. That level of victory is simply not going to happen.
The more votes Reform wins, though, the more seats it’s likely to cost the Tories, rising from 35 if it polls at 9% to 64 if it hits 14%. History suggests that Nigel Farage is mainly interested in influence and a platform, rather than ever risking actually being forced to govern. That does not mean, however, that he can’t make things quite substantially worse for Rishi Sunak along the way.
Hey, buy someone else’s book!
When I started work on A History of the World in 47 Borders, one of the people I took for a beer so I could pick their brains was the elections analyst and writer Lewis Baston, who’d just started showing a striking interest in the topic of borders himself. The reason, it turned out, was that he was working on his own book: Borderlines: A History of Europe Told From the Edges, which just hit the shelves. Here it is now, on the second shelf down:
I’ve got a copy. It’s lovely. You should buy one too, as it makes an excellent accompaniment to my own.
If you’ve not heard me bang on enough about my own book, however (could happen) I was on the Country Life podcast. It’s available from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books and all good bookshops.2
Who was Prince Edward anyway? How the provinces of Canada got their names
I’ve been watching the CBC coverage of the 1993 Canadian election results night – for fun! One of the interesting things about watching Canadian election coverage (there are others, I swear) is the way it emphasises the vast and decentralised nature of what is physically the second largest country in the world. Two hours into coverage, it’s clear not only that the Tories have lost, but that they’ve been wiped out – yet every hour or so, more provinces which have only just finished voting join the broadcast, and are immediately told that it’s basically already all over.
Halfway through this, during some reference or another to the tiny province of Prince Edward Island, I realised – I had absolutely no idea who Prince Edward was. Come to that, I don’t know where the word Ontario comes from, either. Or Manitoba. Or Quebec!
Let’s find out.
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