Labour party

Only a few weeks ago, the polls brought nothing but joy for the Tories. With just six days to go until election day, that’s no longer the case. An Ipsos MORI survey out today cuts the Conservative lead down to just five points. Labour’s support has burst through the 40 per cent mark – rising by six points since Ipsos MORI’s last poll on May 18th. The poll comes off the back of this week’s shock YouGov estimate, which suggested we could be heading for a hung Parliament. And YouGov’s updated election model for today doesn’t bring any better news for the Tories: it suggests that Theresa May will now fall

Well, that didn’t last long: in April, I rejoined the Labour Party. Last Sunday, I cancelled my subscription and cut up my membership card. Being part of the official opposition to a Tory Government, my conscience can live with; being the official opposition to the unborn, it cannot. I’ve always leaned towards backing Labour. And while my radicalism may have mellowed somewhat in my old age, I would certainly have voted for Jeremy Corbyn in the first leadership contest. So when the snap election was called, it seemed like an obvious move to put my money where my ballot is. But the first sign of trouble came almost immediately afterwards, when Labour’s

On the eve of the US presidential election, experts at Princeton university decided that Donald Trump had a 1 per cent chance of being elected. Before the last general election, Populus, the opinion poll firm, gave David Cameron a 0.5 per cent chance of winning a majority. Much is made of the need to look at ‘the data’ when considering political arguments, but so often it is a wildly inaccurate guess with a decimal point at the end to give an aura of scientific specificity. So when we read that Jeremy Corbyn has just a 17 per cent chance of becoming prime minister, this does not mean that the election

Jeremy Corbyn must be furious about his interview with Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour. Not because of the contents of that interview, because presumably he doesn’t mind people thinking he doesn’t have a clue how he’d fund his promise of state-provided childcare. After all, if he thought stuff like that was important, he’d have taken 30 seconds to read the brief about his own policy before announcing it, right? No, I mean he must be furious about what happened after that interview, and happened to Emma. Within minutes, she was subjected to the full spectrum of abuse online from people unhappy about a journalist doing her job and asking a politician

At one of Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups recently, participants were asked what jobs they thought might suit politicians if they were not, well, politicians. In Edinburgh, one respondent unkindly suggested Nicola Sturgeon would make an excellent traffic warden. For her part poor Kezia Dugdale – I’m afraid ‘Poor Kezia Dugdale’ has become the accepted form of labelling the Scottish Labour leader – was reckoned to be just the sort of person who would thrive working in a pet rescue centre. There are many times that must seem preferable to leading the Labour party in Scotland. For the whole of this campaign Ms Dugdale has suggested that the very last thing

The most memorable poster of the 2015 general election campaign was an image of Alex Salmond with Ed Miliband snug in his top pocket. As Adam Boulton points out today, the Tories haven’t tried to revisit that image, but Nicola Sturgeon might have helped them along. She expects Theresa May to win a majority, she said. But if it’s a hung parliament, asked Andrew Neil, would she work with Mr Corbyn on his tax and spend? Her answer:- ‘We’ll work for progressive policies and we’ll work for the policies we put forward in our Manifesto. If there was to be a hung parliament of course we would look to be

The most dangerous thing about Jeremy Corbyn’s speech today, blaming terror attacks in Britain on wars we have fought abroad, is that it is partly true. The temptation for the Conservatives will be to show outrage at the words: ‘Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home’ and to accuse Corbyn of exploiting the Manchester bombing for his own political gain. But they would be extremely foolish to do so because they will be unable to argue away the assertion that British military involvement in the Middle