Might Sunak actually win? A history of election miracles

Is it madness to call a general election when you’re 20 points behind in the polls? That depends on whether the pollsters and pundits are any more reliable now than when they promised us that Brexit would flop, that Hillary would win and that David Cameron had a 0.5 per cent chance of winning the general election. The last ten years have seen a stream of against-all-odds election victories — and Rishi Sunak’s only hope is that he can pull off one of these miracles. Here are four that he might have in mind…

1. David Cameron’s 2015 majority

Such is the hubris of the pollsters that in 2015 they started to produce percentage chances of possible election outcomes. Populus, run by Andrew ‘calamity’ Cooper, created his ‘predictor’ model for the Financial Times. It gave Cameron a 0.2 per cent chance of winning the national poll — a figure that was later updated to a 0.5