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Speaking out: John Bercow (here piectured at the Bingham Lecture), one of the straight-talkers of recent Parliamentary history.
Boris Johnson won’t quit as prime minister because he leads a government that doesn’t believe in accountability for its failures.
That’s the verdict from former Commons Speaker John Bercow after a poll of Conservative Party members put him second to last among cabinet figures with a record low satisfaction rating of -10.3:
The prime minister recorded a net satisfaction rating of -10.3 in a survey of party members, coming in second to last among cabinet figures.
His rating was better only than that of his education secretary Gavin Williamson, who scored -43.1.
I have to include this bit:
Johnson’s rating is likely to be dipping in part because of his initial handling of the pandemic and the number of deaths the UK has suffered.
The urge to be sarcastic and say, “Oh really? Well I never!” is very strong. Of course it’s because he has failed in the principle duty of government which is to protect the people of the United Kingdom.
@RussInCheshire has been brutally funny about it in his regular The Week In Tory tweets:
12. So Boris Johnson went on a charm offensive (and did both), and promised to build 40 new hospitals
13. Seemingly he had forgotten – or hoped we had – that he also promised to build 40 new hospitals a year ago, and then … how can I put this? … didn’t
17. Last week Boris Johnson said the Covid rules were simple, then forgot them, then said they were complicated, then said he’d fine people breaking them, then didn’t fine his own dad
18. This week his own dad broke the rules for a second time and [tumbleweed]
20. I always try to find a supportive and approving quote about Boris Johnson from an star-struck anonymous Tory MP: this week, I have an embarrassment of riches
21. “It’s like ‘carry on coronavirus’, with Boris as Sid James and Matt Hancock as Kenneth Williams”
I’ve quoted some extra tweets in the thread because they support the idea that Johnson doesn’t believe in accountability for himself or his government: he treats us with contempt by repeating a promise that he has already broken; he failed to punish a man (again) for breaking Covid-19 restriction because it was his dad; he treated the deadly threat of Covid-19 as though it was nothing to get het up about; and his own MPs – who are het up about it – turned on him in an expression of frustration at their utter inability to instil in him any sense of responsibility at all.
So we come to former Commons Speaker John Bercow’s appearance on ITV’s Good Morning Britain today (October 6), in which he delivered the home truth we all knew but nobody else seemed willing to say:
Amid claims that the PM's reputation has plunged to a record low. So, should Boris Johnson quit?
(Death Secretary = Matt Hancock, if you didn’t know.)
As if to prove Mr Bercow’s point, Rishi Sunak turned up on Tory mouthpiece BBC Breakfast to sell a load of old tripe to us about Covid-19 tests. He was not challenged on his lie and was therefore not held accountable for it:
Ultimately, the fault for the government lies with us, the people of the UK.
With every new disaster I am reminded of the Joseph de Maistre line, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.”
The UK had a chance to elect a government that would have been much better than Johnson’s, and didn’t.
I’m thinking particularly of the former “Red Wall” constituencies who switched to Johnson because a majority of people there wanted Brexit at any cost.
Well, they’re getting it. I wonder how many people have to die before they accept that the cost is too high, and their current defiance means my guess is that they will probably have to lose some of their own relatives, or face a risk to their own lives, before the message sinks in.
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The image says it all, really: The three polls we’ve had in the last few days have all been asking different questions, so of course they get different answers.
So, contrary to what you might hear from Conservatives and Labour intolerants – sorry, sorry, ‘moderates’ – voters are not turning against Jeremy Corbyn in droves.
Here’s Mike Smithson, from the Political Betting article where This Writer found the image:
With question marks still hanging over voting intention polling there’s been a lot more focus on leader ratings which seemed to have performed far better as voting indicators at GE2015.
But here’s a thing. Over the past five days we’ve seen three completely different pictures of how Mr Corbyn is doing from three of the UK’s leading pollsters. Just look at the chart above.
With Ipsos-MORI things are not going too badly for the new red team captain. YouGov has him a fair bit lower and right at the bottom is ComRes.
The reason is that the three pollsters ask very different questions. For forty years Ipsos-MORI has used the satisfied/dissatisfied question. YouGov’s main measure for more than a decade had been on “well/badly” while in the 2010-2015 parliament ComRes… switched to asking about favourability
Mr Smithson continued with an opinion about the way the Labour leadership has been faring recently: “You can understand why many CON backers are satisfied. Looking on him in favourability terms is, however, a totally different matter.”
Oh, really?
I can’t do anything about his opinion but I can at least put the record straight regarding the ComRes ‘favourability’ rating – because he’s only telling part of the story. Here’s the UK Polling Report:
The reason the Tory lead is bigger [in the ComRes poll] than in recent polls giving them a lead of only six or seven points is down to ComRes having a different methodology, not a sudden fracturing of support.
If you are interested in the specifics of this, the reason for the gap is probably ComRes’s new turnout model. Rather than weighting people based on how likely they claim they are to vote, ComRes estimate people’s likelihood to vote based on demographic factors like age and class. In practice, it means weighting down young people and working class people who are more likely to support Labour.
So ComRes has weighted its polling against Jeremy Corbyn by asking a differently-angled question from the others, and by then weighting the answer against young voters and the working class – who are precisely the people Corbyn has energised into becoming involved with politics once again.
Even though these people are saying they’ll vote, ComRes has decided they won’t, and skews its results accordingly.
A review of polling methods is taking place at the moment, due to the inaccuracy of the polls leading up to the 2015 general election, and some pollsters – including ComRes – may change their methodology after it reports.
That will be a good thing – because, the way ComRes is going at the moment, we could be even more badly misinformed before the next election than we were at the last one.
And intention polls do change the way people vote.
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