‘Science,’ wrote Jules Verne, ‘is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’ Perhaps this is why politics, which claims to be a science, is so littered with tremendous errors at the moment.
It wasn’t just the pollsters and the pundits in Westminster who called this election wrong. People embedded in constituencies couldn’t even correctly predict their own results. These days, politics seems a lot more like alchemy than a real science.
On the night before polling day, a group of Labour MPs compared notes about how things were looking in their patches. It was a miserable conversation in which many were resigned to being dumped by their electorates. Everyone outside a particular metro-politan multi–ethnic bubble reported a hatred of Jeremy Corbyn on the doorstep; hatred of an intensity none of them had seen before. The next day, things still looked bleak.
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