Exactly a year ago this week I was at a dinner party when a famous opinion pollster leaned over to me and said: ‘You know, the best thing about this election is that within two years Chuka Umunna will be the leader of the Labour party and Sajid Javid the leader of the Conservatives.’
He was referring to the last general election — the dinner party had been convened a week before it took place. I think the chap had been invited to tell us all what would happen at the polls — and indeed he delivered a lengthy and earnest peroration on this subject, utilising all the expertise and political nous he had built up over the years.
The following week, then, we dinner-party guests would be able to muse how a pig, blinded at birth by inherited syphilis, deafened by having a knitting needle inserted into both of its eardrums, and rendered utterly insentient through having ingested vast quantities of heroin, ketamine and crack cocaine, would have made a much better stab at predicting the election outcome than this unctuous pharisiacal joker.
On election night itself, as the results came in, I saw the pollster on TV.
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