"Labour will cling to office if the Tories and Reform remain split. Sadly, that seems the most likely outcome"
Telegraph: 11th January 2025: Dan Hannan takes a deep dive into recent polls and suggests there is only one clear route to beat socialism
"Keir Starmer is finished. He has not realised it yet, but his position is irrecoverable. Making bogus pre-election promises, accepting designer clothes, releasing violent offenders to make room for online trolls, paying foreign countries to take British territory, levying punitive taxes on small businesses, treating farmers like kulaks, trashing the economy – prime ministers don’t come back from such things.
There is only one way for Labour to cling to power. If the two right-of-centre parties are evenly enough divided, it might end up winning with as little as a quarter of the popular vote. Such is the logic of first-past-the-post...
...Reform supporters descry, in this latter poll... But before they get carried away, it is worth taking a closer look at the numbers. According to one projection, that poll would leave Labour as the largest party, 68 seats clear of Reform and even further ahead of the Tories. If we look instead at the average of recent surveys, as weighed by Electoral Calculus, Labour is predicted to have 310 MPs, to the Conservatives’ 176 and Reform’s 36.
In other words, we are not experiencing a great sorpasso. Rather, we are staring glumly at the prospect of at least one more, possibly two, Labour-led governments on a paltry and dwindling vote share.
I almost want to weep at the needlessness of it all. As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, electoral geography argues for a pact between the two right-of-centre parties. Maybe not a full alliance, SDP-Liberal style, but a readiness to stand aside in a limited number of seats, as the DUP and UUP used to do...