Hung Parliament - My Arse

The combination of wanting the Tories to remain in power - goodness knows why - and the waning ability to interrogate sources, meaning Government lines to take get recycled as if they were fact, has caused our free and fearless press to move effortlessly from one unconvincing dead cat to another, but convince no-one with brain plugged in and a hole in their arse.

Last week, we were treated to the farcical claim that London Mayor Sadiq Khan could be beaten by the Tories’ latest challenger Susan Hall. The batshit Ms Hall, who had taken a favourable stance on Combover Crybaby Donald Trump, and indeed on the memory of John Enoch Powell, was never going to get within striking range of Khan, who won by more than 11%.

Where the claim originated cannot be told with complete certainty, but it is most likely that the idea of a race too close to call was to distract Tories from inconvenient ideas like changing leader yet again. That means someone not unadjacent to Rishi Sunak pitched the dead cat as a means of giving him another couple of days free of speculation and other turbulence.

That the right-leaning press, and to her shame Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC, ended up looking mightily foolish for being taken in by this drivel, should have caused them to stop and think when the next amateurishly concocted Look Over There was, with the certainty of night following day, waved before the assembled hacks and pundits. But that is to reckon without the desperation.

Here we encounter not just the desperate wanting for the Tories to be doing better - as if - but also the hollowing out of journalistic resources over the years. Investigative journalism is mostly out of the question; shovelling it on is the name of the game. Even the Mail titles, best resourced of all, only do the investigative stuff when it wants to dig up dirt on its current targets.

And so it came to pass yesterday that the Murdoch Times slung the next in what is going to be a long and tedious procession of dead cats on the table. “UK heading for a hung Parliament, says Sunak … PM warns Starmer would be ‘propped up’ in No10”. Ah, the old “frighten voters shitless with the spectre of the SNP” ploy. This is, to no surprise, total tosh.

But do go on. “Sunak seized on a projection by the elections expert Michael Thrasher that suggested if Thursday’s results were replicated in a General Election, Labour would fall short of enough seats to win power”. Two things here. One, it will not be a local election that bins the Tories. And Two, one result from Thursday suggests that the Hung Parliament claim is still tosh.

But for the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph, this is a credible line to take. Hence today’s paper telling readers “Sunak: Election race is closer than polls show” (you don’t capitalise after a colon, Tel people. That howler wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t binned all those subs).

But enough. The one result that shows this dead cat is another dud is the by-election in Blackpool South. Labour did not only win the seat from the Tories, they achieved a swing of over 26%. This is not just up there with the kinds of swings achieved by Labour in the run-up to the 1997 General Election, but beyond them. And we know what happened to the Tories in 1997.

Another recent by-election that shows the Hung Parliament dead cat to be a phoney is that in Mid Bedfordshire, where (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries scored a majority of over 24,500 in 2019, only for it to be overturned by Labour. This was a solidly safe Tory seat. It had returned a Tory MP since Alan Lennox-Boyd took it from the old Liberal Party in 1931.

The whole idea of trying to extrapolate from local election results to predict a General Election outcome is what Sir Humphrey would have called “brave”. It might also be termed “unwise”. Add to that the potential for tactical voting against the Tories from an electorate that knows it’s been screwed, and you get results like Tiverton and Honiton, where the Lib Dems achieved a swing of almost 30% to take the seat. The Tories are facing wipeout.

And that will happen no matter how many dead cats are deployed. That is all.

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