Election 2024 - The Results Are In: - It's a LibDem Landslide!

Excuse the hyperbole in the title to this piece. The "results" are the count of how many separate pieces of communication have been received from each party contesting the local seat. The outcome has never been in doubt, and, far from a last minute campaign by the outsiders to disrupt the trend, the front runner has doubled down on their formidable lead, supplying leaflets both yesterday and today (all other parties, nothing).

Here then, is the count. <clears throat, coughs, taps microphone cautiously>. I, being the returning officer for the Ramblings household in the Stratford-on-Avon constitutency do declare that the sum of the bits of paper collected from the door mat for each party is as follows.

Reform                2
Conservative       2
Labour                 1
LibDem              12
Non-political      1
Green                  0
Independent        0

and that the LibDem effort is hereby elected as the one wasting the greatest amount of paper, taking up the largest amount of space in the paper recycling bag and becoming, in the end, a bit of a bloody irritant.

Back in the real world, I was waking up drowsily to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and was surprised, to put it mildly, to hear the Conservative spokesman in the flagship interview spot concede the election. He said they were going to lose. 

 “I have accepted that where the polls are at the moment – and it seems highly unlikely that they are very, very wrong, because they’ve been consistently in the same place for some time – that we are therefore tomorrow highly likely to be in a situation where we have the largest majority that any party has ever achieved,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. (source: London Evening Standard)

This was not some off-the-rails intern fronting for Conservative Central Office - it was the work and pensions secretary Mel Stride.

This is very odd behaviour. Politicians are normally required to smile, shake their heads gently and say "Of course the only votes that count are those cast in the ballot box" right up to the point that the polls are shown to be roughly correct, and then they can say either they are proud to have the overwhelming mandate of the entire country (based on a 35% share of the vote) or that their policies were absolutely the right ones but they just failed to get their message across and they will do better next time, especially once the other lot have mucked everything up.

It would be hilarious if millions of voters are playing the old lie-to-the-pollsters game to the hilt and a disbelieving Rishi Sunak is back in Downing Street on Friday morning. I would love to hear him explain to Mr Stride his position in the new government (grovelling on the floor and lashing himself with a cat'o'nine tails, I should imagine). But I suspect that the polls are reasonably sound and that a huge change in the political landscape is about to occur.