Boris Johnson’s campaign team has been so well-organised that it predicted exactly the number of votes he would get in today’s secret ballot, I understand. According to WhatsApp messages between his supporters, one member handed Johnson a sealed envelope with ‘114’ written in it before the result, telling him to open it once the official numbers had been declared.
The reason the prediction was correct is that the Johnson operation has been running a data-intensive targeting campaign for about three months, and therefore has a detailed understanding of where each MP is, and how likely they are to support each candidate. Parliamentary ‘handlers’ have offered information on every single MP as a result of repeated meetings and discussions. The data is all fed into a spreadsheet run by Grant Shapps, who developed the accurate prediction.
This approach, very similar to the one that the Tories adopted in their successful 2015 general election campaign, has also meant Johnson hasn’t wasted his time phoning MPs who are very opposed to him or who have already started working for other campaigns.
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