As I said, I hate election campaigns but love election results. So let’s have some fun with the possible outcomes in ten specific seats which may not determine who is in government come July 5th, but whose results are more than usual interest.
I’ll give you my (hugely unreliable) prediction under each one and in the comments beneath you get to tell me who you think will be the winner in each. A kind of political football pools, if you like. The prize? Glory.
Here goes, starting on the Left:
1. Islington North
I had always assumed that Jeremy Corbyn would hold his seat fairly easily since he is far better known than any other candidate and has a reputation as a good local MP. And by voting for him you can give a kicking to the establishment without seeming to help the possibility of a Conservative government. It’s risk-free providing you haven’t noticed his position on Ukraine.
Then last week came a poll putting Corbyn’s Labour opponent, Praful Nargund, on 41% with Corbyn 5% behind. Quixotically Lord Lebedev’s Evening Standard headlined this poll “Jeremy Corbyn close to shock Islington North win in London at General Election, new poll says”. Odd.
I stand by my prediction, but with less certainty than before. Corbyn to win.
UPDATE
Naturally within hours of this post going up a poll appeared contradicting my conclusion. Survation (who also polled Clacton, see below) found that Labour was leading Corbyn by 14% - 43 to 29. The pro-Corbyn Novara Media tweeted out the poll under the heading “Shock Poll Shows It’s Down to the Wire for Corbyn” in Islington South, with a link to a piece arguing that in a two horse race Corbyn would win by 55% to 45%, and that since Corbyn was more popular in the constituency than Starmer or Labour then if enough activists abandoned chasing TERFs in Brighton for a week and came to Islington, the Labour lead could be reversed. (They didn't of course say that thing about Brighton.) On screen the inevitably entitled Grace Blakeley explained that the problem was that ignorant, uninformed and insufficiently “politicised” people were voting Labour and needed to be educated.
14 points is one less than the lead Survation gives Farage in Clacton. To be consistent it ought to change my mind about the result. It just about does. Labour to win.
2. Rochdale
George Galloway, who won the seat back in February after Labour disowned its candidate and was left without one, is not known as a good constituency MP. Usually after a while his constituents come to realise that he is a lazy, bombastic loudmouth who is not that interested in whichever area he is representing this week. But my assumption again had been that not enough time had elapsed between the by-election and July 4th for local voters to work this out.
However though there are no polls, there are the bookies and they put him a strong second favourite to win, and Labour’s Paul Waugh first.
The honest answer is that I have no good idea on this one but my own rules force me to choose and in the belief that the by-election was a freak I’m going for Labour to regain the seat.
3. Chingford and Woodford Green
This is the first of three seats that the Guardian implicitly (and Owen Jones explicitly) seems to hope Labour will lose to candidates off to its Left.
It’s Iain Duncan Smith’s seat which has gradually been demographing itself out of the “safe Tory” category. The Labour candidate last time was a bright Corbynite called Faiza Shaheen, who Labour’s NEC dumped as the election was called. She is standing as an independent against Labour’s Shama Tatler, who is also an impressive candidate.
The main Guardian report on Chingford managed to speak only to supporters of Shaheen and included a photograph of her looking very nice, and none of Tatler, under the headline, “‘A lot of people won’t vote’: Chingford voters unenthusiastic as Labour does battle with Faiza Shaheen”. We get you, Kath, we get you.
This feels like one which really depends on just how far the Tory vote will fall. I don’t believe Shaheen can win and although her candidacy could let Duncan Smith back in, I think I’m in danger of underestimating just how bad things are for the Conservatives. So I’m going for Tatler and Labour. Just.
4. Ilford North
This seat is highly consequential because it’s held by one of Labour’s brightest hopes and most effective politicians, Wes Streeting. Streeting is also the man that the Left would most like to see ousted at this election; if nothing else happened his defeat would be counted a great moral victory.
The Evening Standard in an editorial summarised the situation like this:
Across the country, Labour is enjoying 20-point leads in the polls. But in individual constituencies, sitting MPs don’t feel so safe. Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting is perhaps the most high-profile example. The Ilford North MP is facing a challenge from an independent candidate over a single issue: Gaza.
British Palestinian Leanne Mohamad has been selected to stand for the Redbridge Community Action Group, with the hope that Mr Streeting’s relatively small majority (5,218) and a sizeable Muslim population in his constituency will trigger an electoral earthquake.
The Standard does not mention that Streeting’s majority was over the Conservatives and thereby implies that Mohamad stands a chance. I don’t think she does, despite the Guardian reporter’s obvious enthusiasm for her with her “record of local activism that is striking for one so young, and a warmth and ease that many politicians decades her senior in age and experience can only dream of”. Find. A. Room.
The same report tells us that “her top priorities are to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza and implement an arms embargo against Israel”. I’ve been to Ilford - those are unlikely to be the top priorities of the voters of Ilford.
Streeting to win comfortably.
5. Bristol Central
One thing that Owen Jones and Rory Stewart can agree upon is that they’d both rather vote Green than Labour. This says something I feel about the nature of the party, with its pleasant environmentalism on the one hand and a rather more troublesome far leftism on the other. Largely unnoticed, its authoritarianism against gender critical feminism knocks Starmer’s centralising tendencies into a cocked hat and some of its candidates have been outed as conspiracy theorists and borderline antisemites. The party’s co leader and candidate in this seat, Carla Denyer, is not one of these. She’s a local councillor, a long-term campaigner against fossil fuels and highly personable.
Labour’s sitting MP (the boundaries in Bristol have been changed, so she’s technically fighting a new seat) Thangam Debbonaire, is a talented musician and a cultured shadow culture secretary and also an anti-Corbynite, standing for re-election in a city where the Greens won 34 seats at the last council election, including all 14 in this constituency. So Debbonaire seems the most vulnerable Labour MP in the country.
In an ideal world both women would be in parliament after the election. But the strength of the Greens in the city, the feeling that Labour will win nationally anyway so what’s the harm in voting Green, plus the concentration of the disappointed Corbynite Left on the business of helping the Greens to victory, make my prediction an unusually confident one. Labour to lose.
6. Clacton
Subscribers to this Substack are unlikely to be Farage fans. They may note that Britain’s wannabe Donald Trump, flirter with the AfD and Marine Le Pen and admirer of Vladimir Putin has failed in all previous attempts to win a seat at Westminster. They may also wonder why the residents of Clacton would elect a man with no association whatsoever with the constituency, and will certainly hope that they don’t.
Alas, just because a poll is commissioned by Farage’s bumptious millionaire backer Arron Banks, that doesn’t make it a rogue. The reputable polling company Survation polled 506 Clacton voters by telephone last week and discounting don’t knows 42% went for Farage, 27% for the sitting Tory, Giles Watling – whose mark on British politics has so far been entirely delible – and a remarkable 24% for Labour’s wonderfully flamboyant candidate Jovan Owusu Nepaul.
Farage chose the seat most likely to elect him and the one for whose inhabitants he offers the least - and his celebrity is far greater than anyone else’s in the race (though he is also, it shouldn’t be forgotten, one of the most unpopular politicians in the country). I think he’ll win.
7. Boston and Skegness
Standing in the most pro-Brexit constituency in the country is the man Farage shouldered aside when he decided to become leader of the party they jointly own, Richard Tice. No polling but the bookies have him at 2/1 to win the seat over a Tory I’ve never heard of.
Tice isn’t Farage – which is the nicest thing I can think to say about him. Except that unlike so many of the other Reform candidates, he is no idiot either. Unlike the Reform candidate for Salisbury, a retired KC, who decided to tell a local hustings this week that he had met Vladimir Putin and that he seemed “a good man”. The residents, with their memories of Putin’s novichok adventure in their town, seemed unimpressed.
Again, this one is purely down to how far the Conservative vote collapses. Slightly against my instincts, I’m going for Tice. And that will be Reform’s lot.
8. South West Norfolk.
Now for a couple which don’t matter in the great scheme of things, but which would be fun if they went the wrong way -which is to say, the right way.
In 2019 Liz Truss won 69% of the vote here. I enlist Thomas Paine, of whom there is a statue in the local town of Thetford, among those radical dead who would not have voted for Truss - but just about everybody else did.
But then she became famous and now she is the most unpopular living politician in Britain. There is a hardly a person in the country who doesn’t directly owe Truss the blame for some loss or other. She came, she f***** us all up, she left and she never said sorry and now she is presenting herself before the electors of Norfolk for endorsement.
Before we go one it’s worth recalling that in the Labour landslide year of 1997 Truss’s predecessor, Gillian Shepherd, held the seat by just under 3000.
Last week Darren McCaffrey, Sky News’s political correspondent, took a trip to the constituency to test the mood. This is an excerpt from his report:
"My husband lost 40% of his pension when she did what she did. So he's 67 and still working," one voter said to me.
Another talked about how she couldn't vote for Truss because her daughter's mortgage had risen three times in the past 18 months.
It went on and on. In fact, I was taken aback by the reaction.
There are some who will continue to back her and many who are yet to fully decide who they might back.
But I've spent a lot of my time talking to voters in different parts of the country over the past decade and I can't remember a more visceral reaction to one candidate - and not in a good way.
Me? Truss to lose. Imagine seeing that name on the ballot paper and putting a cross against it.
9. North East Somerset and Hanham
Jacob Rees-Mogg, that egregiously mistaken yet super-confident personification of so much that has gone wrong for Britain, is probably much less unpopular than Truss. But he is also more statistically vulnerable. His Labour opponent Dan Norris once held the seat (allowing for boundary changes since 2010 when he lost it) and so has local pedigree, while some of the more Rees Moggian voters may be susceptible to Reform. It looks like a squeeze.
No way am I not going to predict a Labour victory here. I want you to come back.
10. Portsmouth North.
My last choice actually does matter. Penny Mordaunt, who one suspects on having a Valkyrie breast-plate and horned helmet in her dressing up box, is one of the leading potential moderate candidates for the post-election Tory leadership contest.
But if she loses her seat, she can’t run. In the Thatcher landslide of 1983 the voters of Bristol deprived Tony Benn of the chance of succeeding Michael Foot in the contest won by Neil Kinnock. And in 1997 the burghers of Soutgate put paid to the leadership hopes of Who Dares Wins Portillo. Portillo never went back to politics and instead became Mr TV Train Journeys, a role which made both him and hundreds of thousands of viewers much happier.
Mordaunt has the sensuous, theatrical air of Portillo about her and the voters may reward her for looking like Athena and carrying that absurdly large sword at the coronation – a role that had Elizabeth died in, say, 1996, Portillo would almost certainly have fulfilled.
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. Badenoch looks especially safe since her Reform opponent withdrew after the close of nominations, much to the fury of the owners of the party.
I think she’ll lose and history will flow through a different channel and instead she will make a fabulous TV presenter. Look out for Mordaunt’s Monarchy on BBC1 sometime in 2026.
ERRATUM SLIP
As several readers have pointed out below, Portillo DID try and resurrect his political career, winning a by-election in 1999 and becoming William Hague’s shadow chancellor. He then stood against Ian Duncan Smith for the Tory leadership in 2001 coming third. At the next election he stood down. For some reason my brain had expunged all recollection of this period in Portillo’s political journey. Like Benn, who won a by-election in Chesterfield later in 1997 and held the seat till 2001, the initial defeat derailed Portillo’s real chances of leading his party. To me the rest is railways.
And now it’s your turn. Make your argument…
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!