As Ed Miliband ends the ban on onshore wind and moves to classify it as national infrastructure (i.e. like pylons, the secretary of state approves them and a local council can't go 'we have quite enough power to be going on with) I once again find myself thinking about Rishi Sunak's 2024 campaign.
He is ringing around defeated MPs to commiserate them - a good contact who lost their seat found it very awkward, because clearly Sunak was more surprised by their defeat than they were. (They weren't *thrilled* but as they said, 'I'm not a fucking idiot, I had a lot of time to prepare for it'.)
A thing that you could observe happening in real time from October 2022 to the summer of 2023 was he and his inner circle just forgetting that he lost to Truss.
I guess to be overly charitable, he lost to Truss amongst conservative party members who are not renowned for their acumen in judging effective administrators, but yes, I take the point.
I don’t understand this at all. The polls were rock solid with Labour 20 points ahead for two years. Do they… not know how to read a graph? How to spot that that is an unprecedented judgement on an incumbent party?
jonn elledge wrote a very good piece on how the Tory press appeared to be shielding the Tory leadership from that reality, with their constant stories of how the polls weren't that bad or didn't mean a labour victory was inevitable
Maybe if your first election is 2015 (Tories do better than polls) and you backed Leave in 2016 (some polls wrong, your side wins) then you sort of memory-hole all the instances where polls are either right or are wrong in a way that doesn't benefit the Tories?
True, although Joe Biden apparently has taken to claiming that polls underestimated him in 2020 when in fact they overstated him by about 5 points. Maybe he has the brain of an 81 year old I guess is what I'm saying
I think tbf you do need some level of “that stupid” to repeatedly put yourself forward for election - brash self belief tipping over into arrogance - and if you have repeatedly won tight races it’s slightly more forgivable than Mr Career Safe Seat Sunak (even though Joe is being a bit deluded)
