Thank you for identifying and correcting the Guardians irritatingly starry-eyed bias in favour of Faiza Shaheen. I live in Woodford Green. Shaheen was levered in by Corbynists before the 2019 election and espouses a knee-jerk leftist politics that may warm the hearts of Guardian editors but isn't, I submit, what voters here actually want. Most of the heavy lifting in reducing the Tory majority was down to her predecessor Bilal Mahmood: she only improved Labour's position incrementally (arguably a weak showing despite the national picture - her 2019 campaign received huge levels of support from the Labour leadership, the Unions and Momentum, never mind the ubiquitous Owen Jones). Tatler is an impressive candidate who actually does stuff rather than cultivate a media celebrity. I very much hope my fellow voters will take the opportunity to bid good riddance to intellectually lazy Brexiteerism and protest politics Corbynism at the same time.
On the whocanivotefor.co.uk site it lists Miss Tatler for Labour and Miss Shaheen as an Independent. However, if you click through to the Shaheen candidate statement it says “I am honoured to have been reselected as your Labour candidate [SIC] and will fight again to be your MP at the next general election.”
Of course incorrect, but is it deliberate to attract Labour voters? Surely not.
Without Momentum and Owen Jones there is every chance that the Labour candidate Tatler can win. I feel slightly sorry for IDS who is an honourable man despite being Conservative.
Agreed: much more fun than actually following "the campaign".
Jeremy Hunt in South West Surrey. He's absolutely neck and neck (34% each) with the LibDem standing there, and his majority is only 9000 ("only 9000?"). I haven't forgiven him for his period as DCMS Secretary, or indeed for wrecking the NHS...
Which kind of makes your point - if you're not in the House at the right moment . . . Similarly, Benn returned in under a year, at the Chesterfield by-election, but (for good or ill) was never again the same force.
What’s interesting about that is the assumption that Portillo would have become leader if he hadn’t lost Enfield Southgate. As MP for K&C he stood for the leadership in 2001 and came third.
That was 4 years later, after he'd moderated too far (or maybe the Tory right had moved even further to the right) to be the Tory right pin-up. Didn't Tebbit and others make ugly references to his not being a proper "family man"?
I think Portillo would have been a stronger candidate (for the Tory leadership) in 1997, because he would have been a more right wing candidate, as you say. He had become a proto-moderniser by 2001.
It is so depressing to view the surfeit of talent in our politics. To be deciding on an,anybody but them’ basis means little optimism for our future country. We may all be fed up with politics, but we do need an injection of talented leaders who work for the citizenships.
Count Binface may split the anti Tory vote. Of course, were we to be denied the delight of RS losing his seat, a more slow burn revenge would be to watch him remain on the backbenches as he has pledged to do.
Wonderfully entertaining, and it will be a delight if Truss, Rees-Mogg and Sunak provide us with a triple Portillo-moment night. However, there are some things here that are a pity: for Thangam Debbonaire to lose would be a shame; and although I am far from being a Tory, Penny Morduant would be streets better than Badenoch or Braverman as a future party leader.
The chance of the Lib Dems becoming the official opposition is very small, but if it were to happen they would be driven to become a seriously serious party again after exactly 100 years. Also, the Tories would really have to decide if they fall further to the right or if they revert a little closed to the centre.
Yes. Even though I have never voted Conservative (from 1970 to today) Some Conservative MPs are decent people, and we need a strong effective opposition to hold HMG to account.
In that context, it would be as disastrous for the Cons to move even further ‘to the Right’ as it was for Labour to be ‘far Left’.
Yes, I agree absolutely, and I also have never voted conservative since the same date! The dangers of a move to the extreme right were made much greater by the evil Johnson's defenestration of most of those decent people (your phrase) at the time of the Brexit turmoil. He and Cummings bear many heavy responsibilities.
I think they will move further right and it is far more dangerous than Labour's left moments, because the Conservatives/Reform/KIP/Xit could actually win power in the future.
A horrible thought, and not impossible. How well will Reform do on 04/07? Several of their candidates have endorsed the British National Party. The IFS says their tax & spend policies have no credibility. Mr Farage has been criticized for suggesting NATO caused Russia to invade Ukraine. Will voters be taken in? It seems incredible that our oldest political party could do this.
What worries me is that Britain has usually been governed from right of centre. If the current right-of-centre parties are all Putinist racist cranks, is that enough to guarantee they won't win until they become less extreme again? Will the electorate keep punishing them until they do? The answer to these questions could be yes but I don't think it's certain. As for Reform this time, I think there is a scenario in which they get about 13% of the vote and only Farage, and maybe Anderson, win their seats. That probably also means 120+ Tories and no wipeout. But Reform could do much better, actually get the 19% seen in some polls, and take a handful of seats. That would be the Tory 50 seat scenario, which would be very entertaining - but we might not like the eventual aftermath.
I imagine that if the LibDems end up ahead of the tories, any moderate Tories left would join the LibDems. Maybe Mordaunt will become leader of the LibDems!
Hoping that any undecideds in Bristol Central will be so outraged by the tsunami of paper that Denyer 's supporters have pushed through our doors that they stick with Thangam
Islington North - Mr Corbyn 8/11; Labour 6/5. Mr Corbyn has a following; Labour candidate is poor.
Rochdale - Labour 4/7; Mr Galloway 9/4. Good news for constituents and us.
Chingford & Wood Green - Labour 2/5; Conservatives 7/2; Miss Shaheen 11/2. Gaza is not a serious matter for GE, and voters will not follow Miss Shaheen.
Ilford North - Labour 1/20; Miss Mohammad 14/1. It would be disastrous if Mr Streeting is not re-elected.
Clacton - Reform 2/11, Labour 8/1. Mr Farage has personal following, and Clacton voted UKIP in the past.
Bristol East - Labour 1/200; Green 50/1. Voters will be deterred by horrible social policy of Greens.
Boston & Skegness - Conservative 8/11; Reform 6/4. Mr Tice May get closer than this suggests.
South West Norfolk - Conservatives 11/8; Labour 7/4. Constituency has Tory members who follow Miss Truss.
Somerset North East and Hanham - Labour 4/11; Conservatives 7/2. This may be upset - Mr Rees-Mogg has a following.
Portsmouth North - Labour 4/9; Conservatives 2/1. Portsmouth is traditional Labour territory.
Greens are 4/11 in Bristol Central, Lab 12/5. I don't think there is any value there. I also wouldn't take the 50/1 in Bristol East. They are not going to win outside of a tiny selection of seats.
Portsmouth really isn’t “traditional Labour territory”. Portsmouth South had never returned a Labour MP until 2017 and Portsmouth North has swung back and forth: Conservative 1979-97, Labour 1997-2010, Conservative since then.
Regarding the lovely painting by Rousseau, what form of European football involves catching the ball unless you're the goalie? BTW, Grade A choice of artwork.
Rousseau made this picture - which is a favourite of mine - shortly after the first rugby international was played in Paris but I think his familiarity with the game was on a similar level to Durer's knowledge of rhinoceroses. It's purely imaginative. The shape of the ball may have come from his habit of including a circular object in his paintings. The central figure is supposed to be a self-portrait. It's in the New York Guggenheim.
Thanks so much for this helpful information. I love Rousseau but this is the first time I've seen this picture. I should make a more of an effort to find more of his lovely works.
Thanks for this. I am looking forward to many Portillo moments. Sam Freedman came up with the concept of Liz Truss having a shame-resistant force-field, which I think sums her up perfectly.
I am dreading the People's Front of Judea versus Judean People's Front nonsense to come after the election.
Surely I'm not the only person who thinks completely differently for local and general elections? For once, however, it's coincided as I live in North Shropshire and, here, the only way to be certain to get Labour in and Tories out (not that my little vote is likely to stop that happening - yippee!) is to vote Lib Dem and - to be fair - Helen Morgan hasn't been completely useless (she's got a good Press Secretary, anyway).
I find it hard to believe but Rees Mogg’s parliamentary neighbour Liam Fox has by all accounts got a real fight on his hands to hold North Somerset where there is a concerted tactical voting campaign behind the Labour candidate. I think Fox will hold on - just.
"Meanwhile two of Mordaunt’s main rivals, Kemi Badenoch in Saffron Walden and Suella Braverman in Fareham hold seats at the irreducible core of Tory Britain. If they go, Ed Davey becomes leader of the Opposition. " Ahhhhh ... wish I hadn't seen that possibility - now no result can be truly great without it!
The best thing about Truss losing is that you know she absolutely would not be gracious in defeat. Ditto JRM.
Oh please let truss lose!
Thank you for identifying and correcting the Guardians irritatingly starry-eyed bias in favour of Faiza Shaheen. I live in Woodford Green. Shaheen was levered in by Corbynists before the 2019 election and espouses a knee-jerk leftist politics that may warm the hearts of Guardian editors but isn't, I submit, what voters here actually want. Most of the heavy lifting in reducing the Tory majority was down to her predecessor Bilal Mahmood: she only improved Labour's position incrementally (arguably a weak showing despite the national picture - her 2019 campaign received huge levels of support from the Labour leadership, the Unions and Momentum, never mind the ubiquitous Owen Jones). Tatler is an impressive candidate who actually does stuff rather than cultivate a media celebrity. I very much hope my fellow voters will take the opportunity to bid good riddance to intellectually lazy Brexiteerism and protest politics Corbynism at the same time.
On the whocanivotefor.co.uk site it lists Miss Tatler for Labour and Miss Shaheen as an Independent. However, if you click through to the Shaheen candidate statement it says “I am honoured to have been reselected as your Labour candidate [SIC] and will fight again to be your MP at the next general election.”
Of course incorrect, but is it deliberate to attract Labour voters? Surely not.
Without Momentum and Owen Jones there is every chance that the Labour candidate Tatler can win. I feel slightly sorry for IDS who is an honourable man despite being Conservative.
Agreed: much more fun than actually following "the campaign".
Jeremy Hunt in South West Surrey. He's absolutely neck and neck (34% each) with the LibDem standing there, and his majority is only 9000 ("only 9000?"). I haven't forgiven him for his period as DCMS Secretary, or indeed for wrecking the NHS...
Hunt to lose to the LDs.
Hunt isn’t running in SW Surrey (which I’m not sure exists now because boundary changes).
He’s running in the new constituency of Godalming & Ash. Although you’re absolutely right LD is the vote there to kick him out.
I gather there’s a game the locals are playing.
Poster goes up. H is spray-painted over with C. Tory activists replace poster. Poster is again defaced in the same way. Rinse and repeat.
Such fun.
Portillo never went back to politics?? Sat for 6 years for Kensington & Chelsea.
You are right, of course. Somehow it slipped my memory
Which kind of makes your point - if you're not in the House at the right moment . . . Similarly, Benn returned in under a year, at the Chesterfield by-election, but (for good or ill) was never again the same force.
What’s interesting about that is the assumption that Portillo would have become leader if he hadn’t lost Enfield Southgate. As MP for K&C he stood for the leadership in 2001 and came third.
That was 4 years later, after he'd moderated too far (or maybe the Tory right had moved even further to the right) to be the Tory right pin-up. Didn't Tebbit and others make ugly references to his not being a proper "family man"?
I think Portillo would have been a stronger candidate (for the Tory leadership) in 1997, because he would have been a more right wing candidate, as you say. He had become a proto-moderniser by 2001.
It is so depressing to view the surfeit of talent in our politics. To be deciding on an,anybody but them’ basis means little optimism for our future country. We may all be fed up with politics, but we do need an injection of talented leaders who work for the citizenships.
Talking of Portillo moments, Sunak losing in Richmond isn't completely impossible and would be even more hilarious than Truss losing.
Count Binface may split the anti Tory vote. Of course, were we to be denied the delight of RS losing his seat, a more slow burn revenge would be to watch him remain on the backbenches as he has pledged to do.
I hope you are right about Rochdale, Paul Waugh is a good man, I think. Galloway not so much.
Wonderfully entertaining, and it will be a delight if Truss, Rees-Mogg and Sunak provide us with a triple Portillo-moment night. However, there are some things here that are a pity: for Thangam Debbonaire to lose would be a shame; and although I am far from being a Tory, Penny Morduant would be streets better than Badenoch or Braverman as a future party leader.
The chance of the Lib Dems becoming the official opposition is very small, but if it were to happen they would be driven to become a seriously serious party again after exactly 100 years. Also, the Tories would really have to decide if they fall further to the right or if they revert a little closed to the centre.
Yes. Even though I have never voted Conservative (from 1970 to today) Some Conservative MPs are decent people, and we need a strong effective opposition to hold HMG to account.
In that context, it would be as disastrous for the Cons to move even further ‘to the Right’ as it was for Labour to be ‘far Left’.
Yes, I agree absolutely, and I also have never voted conservative since the same date! The dangers of a move to the extreme right were made much greater by the evil Johnson's defenestration of most of those decent people (your phrase) at the time of the Brexit turmoil. He and Cummings bear many heavy responsibilities.
I think they will move further right and it is far more dangerous than Labour's left moments, because the Conservatives/Reform/KIP/Xit could actually win power in the future.
A horrible thought, and not impossible. How well will Reform do on 04/07? Several of their candidates have endorsed the British National Party. The IFS says their tax & spend policies have no credibility. Mr Farage has been criticized for suggesting NATO caused Russia to invade Ukraine. Will voters be taken in? It seems incredible that our oldest political party could do this.
What worries me is that Britain has usually been governed from right of centre. If the current right-of-centre parties are all Putinist racist cranks, is that enough to guarantee they won't win until they become less extreme again? Will the electorate keep punishing them until they do? The answer to these questions could be yes but I don't think it's certain. As for Reform this time, I think there is a scenario in which they get about 13% of the vote and only Farage, and maybe Anderson, win their seats. That probably also means 120+ Tories and no wipeout. But Reform could do much better, actually get the 19% seen in some polls, and take a handful of seats. That would be the Tory 50 seat scenario, which would be very entertaining - but we might not like the eventual aftermath.
I imagine that if the LibDems end up ahead of the tories, any moderate Tories left would join the LibDems. Maybe Mordaunt will become leader of the LibDems!
Hoping that any undecideds in Bristol Central will be so outraged by the tsunami of paper that Denyer 's supporters have pushed through our doors that they stick with Thangam
Follow the bookmakers:
Islington North - Mr Corbyn 8/11; Labour 6/5. Mr Corbyn has a following; Labour candidate is poor.
Rochdale - Labour 4/7; Mr Galloway 9/4. Good news for constituents and us.
Chingford & Wood Green - Labour 2/5; Conservatives 7/2; Miss Shaheen 11/2. Gaza is not a serious matter for GE, and voters will not follow Miss Shaheen.
Ilford North - Labour 1/20; Miss Mohammad 14/1. It would be disastrous if Mr Streeting is not re-elected.
Clacton - Reform 2/11, Labour 8/1. Mr Farage has personal following, and Clacton voted UKIP in the past.
Bristol East - Labour 1/200; Green 50/1. Voters will be deterred by horrible social policy of Greens.
Boston & Skegness - Conservative 8/11; Reform 6/4. Mr Tice May get closer than this suggests.
South West Norfolk - Conservatives 11/8; Labour 7/4. Constituency has Tory members who follow Miss Truss.
Somerset North East and Hanham - Labour 4/11; Conservatives 7/2. This may be upset - Mr Rees-Mogg has a following.
Portsmouth North - Labour 4/9; Conservatives 2/1. Portsmouth is traditional Labour territory.
It's Bristol Central that the Greens are quite likely to take.
So I have read too. Jump in at 50/1?
Greens are 4/11 in Bristol Central, Lab 12/5. I don't think there is any value there. I also wouldn't take the 50/1 in Bristol East. They are not going to win outside of a tiny selection of seats.
Portsmouth really isn’t “traditional Labour territory”. Portsmouth South had never returned a Labour MP until 2017 and Portsmouth North has swung back and forth: Conservative 1979-97, Labour 1997-2010, Conservative since then.
Regarding the lovely painting by Rousseau, what form of European football involves catching the ball unless you're the goalie? BTW, Grade A choice of artwork.
One thing we can say for certain is that 19th century sport was much less regulated and standardized than sport today.
Well, Rugby? But does it have to be played with a round ball?
Rousseau was a French artist —maybe there was a 19th century French variant that involved the hands.
Rousseau made this picture - which is a favourite of mine - shortly after the first rugby international was played in Paris but I think his familiarity with the game was on a similar level to Durer's knowledge of rhinoceroses. It's purely imaginative. The shape of the ball may have come from his habit of including a circular object in his paintings. The central figure is supposed to be a self-portrait. It's in the New York Guggenheim.
Thanks so much for this helpful information. I love Rousseau but this is the first time I've seen this picture. I should make a more of an effort to find more of his lovely works.
Ball in the picture looks ellipsoid to me, but if round it must be Gaelic football! - you can see the white posts and cross-bar behind the players?!
Thanks for this. I am looking forward to many Portillo moments. Sam Freedman came up with the concept of Liz Truss having a shame-resistant force-field, which I think sums her up perfectly.
I am dreading the People's Front of Judea versus Judean People's Front nonsense to come after the election.
Surely I'm not the only person who thinks completely differently for local and general elections? For once, however, it's coincided as I live in North Shropshire and, here, the only way to be certain to get Labour in and Tories out (not that my little vote is likely to stop that happening - yippee!) is to vote Lib Dem and - to be fair - Helen Morgan hasn't been completely useless (she's got a good Press Secretary, anyway).
I find it hard to believe but Rees Mogg’s parliamentary neighbour Liam Fox has by all accounts got a real fight on his hands to hold North Somerset where there is a concerted tactical voting campaign behind the Labour candidate. I think Fox will hold on - just.
"Meanwhile two of Mordaunt’s main rivals, Kemi Badenoch in Saffron Walden and Suella Braverman in Fareham hold seats at the irreducible core of Tory Britain. If they go, Ed Davey becomes leader of the Opposition. " Ahhhhh ... wish I hadn't seen that possibility - now no result can be truly great without it!