England Aren't That Good

Over the last few weeks, I have been continually asked to justify my incessant ramblings on the England cricket team (including by several cricket writers in the press).

Since they are incessant ramblings - and that is basically what a blog is for, is it not? - I thought I would duly oblige in the wake of the latest Baz-balls-up in Hamilton.

The attitude has been "we won the series, everything is fine". This seems to be the ECB line to take and (in combination with various other ECB "lines") has been parroted in the last few days by a number of respected cricket journalists who either should know better, are incapable of independent thought, or are giving the current setup an easy ride (presumably upon pain of ECB sanction).

After the Pakistan capitulation, where Pakistan learnt from England's success in the first test (Brook and Root's mammoth hundreds were noticeably boundary-shy, and Saud Shakeel and others duly obliged in the second and third tests with similar lots-of-singles hundreds), England had a total brain explosion when facing Sajid Khan and Noman Ali, who are hardly Ashwin and Jadeja, and averaged a pathetic 21.10 and 13.85 against them only.

In fact, that 4-1 loss to India at the start of the year prompted a "Bazball reset", the phrase being coined by most of the media to explain how Jonny Bairstow, Ben Foakes, Ollie Robinson, and to a lesser extent Jack Leach and James Anderson, were unceremoniously dumped despite not doing a whole lot wrong. In their place came Jamie Smith, Gus Atkinson, Shoaib Bashir, and recalls for Matt Potts and Olly Stone.

Firstly, the Gus Atkinson pick was not a Bazball stab-in-the-dark pick despite the press's insistence otherwise. Atkinson was on the trip to India and he should have probably played the last Test. He has done very well and a lot of column inches have been written about him, so I won't repeat what has already been said on that front. However, I will dispute the idea Anderson was dumped (no, let's be honest - sacked) and Atkinson "replaced" him. Atkinson had been hammering the door down for at least a year and was one of the only people to leave the Cricket World Cup with his reputation enhanced.

Second, there has been a complete lack of scrutiny on the Bashir decision to pick him over Jack Leach. Despite playing all but two Tests this year (and one of which was due to visa issues), his numbers are extremely poor in both economy rate and average. "Ah," their defenders say, "he is a work in progress, he'll get better". But will he? We were here 10 years ago with Moeen Ali. Then, as now, he was seen a dodgy off spinner with "potential" (a fancy word for not actually having achieved anything). He ended up being a bits-and-pieces player and neither his batting nor bowling numbers justified his continued inclusion in the side over and above others, initially Gareth Batty but then Adil Rashid and Jack Leach too. His economy rate, much like Bashir's, was extremely expensive for an off spinner, and forced England to pick a fourth seamer when Stokes was unavailable (including in last year's Ashes), as he could never tie down one end and allow three quicks to rotate at the other. There have been 35 Tests where Stokes and Leach have played together. Stokes, in these matches, bowls just 13.5 overs per Test. When Stokes plays without Leach (75 Tests), he bowls, on average, 20.5 overs per Test. That's a huge strain on Stokes's body and physique. Bashir's numbers themselves deserve more scrutiny. An average of 40.16 from 15 Tests (including 6 in Asia!) and an economy rate of 3.75 is just poor, however you cut it. His numbers are especially poor in the second half of the year (Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and New Zealand), where he averages 50.26 and an economy rate of 3.93. That is just poor, however you cut it.

The excuse here is that Bashir is a better option than Leach in Australia, but I am entirely unclear where the notion has come from that off spin is what is needed in Australia. (This brainrot seems to have also affected the West Indies, who selected Roston Chase in their 2022-23 tour of Australia over their left arm spinners, and Chase duly returned figures of 3 wickets @ 104.33). Off spin in the 21st century is a death sentence in Australia. Only five off spinners have taken 10 wickets in Australia this century. Three of them are Australian. Graeme Swann is one, but he averaged 52.59 - are England seriously saying they think Bashir can do better than Swann!?

And at this point Bashir's defenders (as indeed Moeen Ali's) will point to strike rate and how it is more important than averages or economy. Well that is categorically disproven if you plot 2024's wicket takers on a graph, strike rate vs average. Those with the best averages had the best strike rates so you cannot make the Moeen Ali argument to defend Bashir this time round.

Bowl Strike Rate (x) vs Bowl Avg (y), min 10 wkts

Whilst we're on the subject of silly selections, we need to talk about the selection of Josh Hull, who the media seem to have forgotten about. It was a proper stab in the dark and did not work out, especially if (like me) you were unlucky enough to watch his floaty half-volleys at The Oval. Yet I have seen virtually no scrutiny and criticism of this decision.

There is always an excuse for this England side when things don't go wrong:

"We won the series, so the brain explosion in Hamilton doesn't matter."

"We won the series, so the capitulation against Sri Lanka at The Oval doesn't matter."

"We're not back in Asia until February 2027, so the Pakistan series loss doesn't matter."

"Shoaib Bashir's numbers may be dismal but his release height and golf handicap are great, which is more important."

"Zak Crawley has great potential and knows Rob Key, it doesn't matter that he's much worse than Rory Burns."

"We're never going to win the World Test Championship, so it doesn't matter about over rates or dead rubbers."

"It doesn't matter that we lost by 400 runs, we're saving Test cricket."

"James Anderson is too old, it doesn't matter Chris Woakes is slower than him." 

 

Ah yes, GOLF. Bloody golf. You got the sense at various times that England would rather be on the golf course than playing cricket or winning Tests. The final day at Hamilton being a good example - Bethell and Root had played well in the morning, but after lunch McCullum had seemingly ordered them to get out as quickly as possible, and Ollie Pope, Brydon Carse, Gus Atkinson, and Shoaib Bashir duly obliged by perishing in the deep (or in Pope's case, reverse scooping).

We want to see England care about every Test. Is that so much to ask? Well, if you listen to Ben Stokes, it is. The England captain apparently "doesn't understand" the WTC (another comment that didn't get anywhere near as much criticism as it should have done) and a side of England's resources and calibre should have done much better. Their WTC record for 2023-25 finished up as Played 22, Won 11, Lost 10, Drawn 1. Ignoring any over rate penalties for the moment, that gives them 136 points out of a possible 264 and just a 51.5% score. The WTC's detractors say it's not fair as England have a harder fixture list but this assessment is "skibidi toilet", I believe the correct Gen Alpha phrase is, especially for Australia and India, who also had to play 10 Tests against the other two "big three" nations. Indeed, apart from Bangladesh and South Africa, every team played at least two of the "big three" (New Zealand and the West Indies had the misfortune of playing all three of them). Is it so much to ask for England to get 60%, and thus have a good chance of qualifying for the final? A side of our resources ought to be able to do so, right? Flipping the results at The Oval, one of the two Pakistan capitulations, and the Hamilton brain explosion would give England a much better record of W14 L7 D1, and even with a few over rate points losses this would be likely to qualify for the final.

After the Pakistan capitulation I said to George Dobell at The Cricketer that England had been given an easy ride by the media. And he agreed with me.

I am not going to name and shame journalists and pundits here but the extent to which everyone has been singing from the same hymn sheet, that everything is fine, England are having great fun, McCullum has shown "ruthlessness" in selection decisions (a word that bizarrely came up in two very similar articles in two very different publications by two very well respected journalists), that Ollie Pope is the antichrist whilst Zak Crawley, Jacob Bethell, and Shoaib Bashir represent the second coming, and that the future is bright for England.

Ollie Pope cannot win, it would seem. Following a feast-or-famine series in India he then followed that up with an excellent series against the West Indies - 1x 100 and 2x 50; only once did he fail to pass 50 - but his detractors remained in the press. The century was described as a "poor" one as he was dropped twice along the way (I notice this criticism has not been applied to Harry Brook's century in Christchurch two weeks ago, when he was dropped five times). Two poor Tests against Sri Lanka followed and the knives came out for him again, and even 154 in the final Test wasn't enough for his critics. A poor series against Pakistan saw the great and good of cricket calling for him to face the axe, and now I was astonished to read articles saying that it is somehow a bad thing he has got runs batting down the order against New Zealand whilst keeping wicket and vice-captaining.

Anyone - and that includes any journalist or pundit reading this rant - who thinks Crawley should be retained and Pope dropped needs to give their head a wobble.

Why have I never liked Crawley? Simple - I believe he is keeping better players out of the side. I declare my interest as Rory Burns's biggest fan, but I would rather see Keaton Jennings in his place too. It's also interesting to me that New Zealand are Crawley's worst team (avg 10.42) whilst they are Rory Burns's best team (avg 60.28). In fact, since his debut, only nine England players average less than Crawley against New Zealand - and that includes the bowlers. Perhaps most tellingly, in that time period Crawley is out-averaged by James Anderson against New Zealand. Much like Bashir, Crawley's returns have got worse throughout the year, averaging 24.75 against the West Indies, 27.80 against Pakistan, and 8.66 against New Zealand. In the Crowe-Thorpe Trophy Crawley's average ranks 20th of 25 players on either side: only Shoaib Bashir (8.00), Devon Conway (5.25), Matt Henry (5.16), Will O'Rourke (3.66), and Matt Potts (0.50) averaged less than he did. Two of those five (Bashir and O'Rourke) are regarded as rabbits. But the media are not questioning Crawley's place in the side. Maybe Rob Key and/or the ICC has leaned unduly on the media (which would technically be a breach of Article 10 of the ECHR) and thus the media are silenced. Or the media have just been suffering from collective Bazball-itis.

Either way, the need to protect Rob Key's mate has seen the end of the international careers of Dan Lawrence (unfairly asked to open in his place), Rory Burns, and presumably Dom Sibley and Haseeb Hameed too, although those last two are young enough to force themselves back in... in theory. I say "in theory" as England have had a habit for about 20 years now of picking players before they are ready, then they fail and are discarded forever despite any improvement they subsequently make. I am not saying that young players should be protected from being dropped - but the door should not be closed on them. Hameed, Sibley, and Lawrence can be added to the Liam Dawson collection of players who will now never return having been picked well before their time. In chronological order, England have picked 42 players for their Test debuts in the 21st century before the age of 24. The list is here if you want to look at it in full. Very few of these players were dropped, then later recalled. You will no doubt look at that list and go "well, their test careers prove they will never be good enough", but that merely proves the argument - you are saying they can never, ever improve, and should never be picked again.

Are England better now than they were in India? No. The Pakistan Baz-balls-up proved that. And although England beat New Zealand 2-1, I feel very empty about it and unenthused. The first test was so poor from New Zealand that you genuinely wondered if the game had been fixed, dropping Harry Brook five times and handing wickets out to Shoaib Bashir like a badly-constructed, unfunny metaphor. Bethell's numbers did very well but his defensive technique when facing right arm around the wicket was lacking. Kemar Roach found him out in the County Championship this way in the summer, and his first innings at Christchurch was equally poor. Whilst he deserves more time in the side, it has been pointed out to me that as he is in the IPL for England's next Test against Zimbabwe, that solves England's selection conundrum of picking three from Crawley, Bethell, Pope, and Smith. What a convenience!

The dot ball percentages I alluded to earlier perhaps prove my notion of "work smarter, not harder". As you can see from the below graph, those with lower dot ball percentages had higher averages this year (minimum 200 runs):

Dot ball % (x) vs Bat Avg (y), min 200 runs

But proving this more than anything is the correlation between dismissal rate and average. You will note that the players with the best averages have the most balls between dismissals. You may consider this to be self-evident, but the one to look at here is Duckett - it proves strike rate is not everything. The best averages have been from the "normal" players, who bat a decent but not too fast tempo.

Strike Rate (x) vs Bat Avg (y), min 200 runs

Dismissal rate (x) vs Bat Avg (y), min 200 runs

And here is a complex chart showing all three data sets.

Strike Rate (x) vs Dismissal Rate (y) vs Bat Avg (bubble size), min 200 runs

I have a bad feeling I am going to be sat here in 12 months' time after another away Ashes drubbing, saying "I told you so".

Elections, Inflections, Reflections, and Suggestions

It's all over at last. Election 2024 has been and gone and now we must dive into the results to find out what happened, how it happened, and what happens next.

Firstly, the scale of the Labour landslide should not be underestimated. Their majority of 172 is only five short of Tony Blair's majority of 177 in 1997, and bigger than the 2001 Blair landslide of 165. It is also the Conservatives' worst result since their formation in the 1830s, and if you care to go back that far, since 1761 when they were the Tories.

So, we all know what we're here for. Stats, percentages, swings, gains, losses, you know the drill.

Swingometer time.

The first thing to note straightaway is that the swing does not show a Labour majority, let alone a landslide. However, when you look at the regional picture we get a slightly clearer outcome.

(That took far too long to make. Thanks Rishi for calling the election before I was ready.)

That isn't an error by the way - there were no Conservative/Labour marginals in Scotland! As you can see we've actually run out of swing on our regional swingometer, so the figures have been added in parentheses

As you can see, the large amount of marginals in the North, Midlands, and South helps Labour as they achieved a higher swing in these regions. They comparatively did pretty badly in Wales and London (especially in the case of the capital) but the simple fact is this: they didn't need big swings in Wales and London. The efficiency of the Labour vote was extraordinary, and indeed in many of these seats the Reform effect did help.

But for Labour the issue was where they had strong independent challenges. For a party that won 410 seats, their vote share dropped in 226 seats out of 631 we are looking at, an extraordinary number. By contrast, in 2019, the Conservative vote share dropped just in just 136 seats - and they won 55 fewer seats.

There may be some tactical voting at work here too. The average change in the Labour vote where the seat result was a LD Gain from Con was -2.5%.

Another casualty of the early election for me was the fact I only did 160 target seats for the parties. Labour's attack have turned this board almost entirely red, hitting 149 of their top 160 targets.

The five Conservatives who defended successfully (Iain Duncan Smith, Robbie Moore, Bob Blackman, Matt Vickers, and Chris Philp) must now know what it's like to be in an electric chair during a power failure.

I will segue at this point to the SNP collapse, as it also ties in to the Labour story. 

As you can see, Labour gained almost everything the SNP held in Scotland. There was a swing in Scotland of 15.8% from the SNP to Labour, enough to wipe them out almost entirely. Indeed, the only SNP successful defences came where they were fighting the Conservatives principally (they even made one gain from the Conservatives).

As you can see from this board, Labour's 10 biggest vote share increases were all "Lab gain from SNP" seats north of the border. But as you can see their 10 biggest drops all featured a major independent candidate which siphoned off Labour votes for the most part.

(This is by party, so I am treating Islington North re Jeremy Corbyn as a "new" candidate rather than directly comparable with the 2019 Labour vote.)

It has been suggested that most of these seats feature heavily Muslim populations, but the Census data by Parliamentary data by religion is not easily sortable and difficult to analyse, so would require a huge amount of technical jiggery-pokery to ascertain the accuracy of this. If true, however, we are possibly ushering in a worrying era of sectarianism in elections. Indeed, this is what MRP polling is all about; profiling a seat by its demographics and polling each demographic as to their voting intention. But that is for another time. If I were doing a paper at University, or another dissertation, or a Masters, I would seriously like to look into this further. It is my intention to do some more work on this in the future, but this would require a huge amount of time to sift through the data. So I invite anyone reading this to do that analysis and share it with me.

As you can see on the board, four of the five biggest drops in the Conservative vote were seats where Reform gained from them (the missing one here is Ashfield, which was a three-way marginal in 2019 between the Conservatives, Labour, and an Independent). It is at this point I declare my interest as one of my friends worked for the defeated MP for Clacton so I cannot help but shed a tear or two - as well as some major embarrassment when I point out they did the worst of any Conservative in the country... 

It is very hard for us to ascertain Reform's performance given they didn't stand in many seats in 2019. Thus, most of their biggest vote share gains are where they did not stand, such as Clacton, and thus were coming from 0.0% (although this is affected by boundary changes so is difficult to work out). Their average change in vote share in seats they stood in both 2024 and 2019 is +10.5%. Just a bit of fun, but if we take that and apply it to the 2019 seats where they did not stand (2024 vote share - 10.5%) to "predict" their vote shares (back of a fag packet stuff here because I haven't even taken regionalisation into account), in 2019 there is only one seat where the "theoretical" Reform vote was bigger than the majority (Canterbury, which was a Labour hold at that election). The Conservatives cannot therefore claim the comparative lack of Reform inflated their majority in 2019.

Adding together the Conservative and Reform votes would have garnered an extra 176 seats between them, thus winning 302 seats - still not enough to govern. Now, that is a massive oversimplification, and there is no guarantee (in fact, I would suggest there is an impossibility) of all of these voters combining forces. Of a greater worry for the Conservatives is where they were hurt by the Liberal Democrats. Not since 1924 have the Conservatives won a majority when the Liberal Democrats (or their predecessors) have scored 40 or more MPs, and the Lib Dems' results of 72, their best since 1923 when Asquith scored 158 seats, was the nail in the Conservative coffin. Although tactical voting by Labour supporters did play a part (outlined above) my model still predicted 53 seats for them. It is clear that the Conservatives must recapture these lost Lib Dems seats at the next election.

One funny aside here is one complete failure of the official exit poll, which predicted Finchley & Golders Green being a Lib Dem gain from Con. In the actual event, it was the Lib Dems' worst result of the night, losing 25.0% of their vote share!

And now we've come to the moment that I suspect many of you clicked on this for: the Conservative wipeout - and the PowerPoint slide dump.

The Conservative defence board makes for grim reading for Conservatives. It is, of course, very similar to the Labour board attack, but also shows their failure to protect against the Liberal Democrats too. Not a single successful defence against anyone is mounted in the third column. And these are seats 65-96! Had I had time to do a page two, it would have been even more galling for the Conservatives. Indeed, two pages wouldn't even have been enough to show all the losses. The losses which would have necessitated a third page are Lichfield (Lab gain; Con defence 321), Tamworth (Lab gain; Con defence 325), Waveney Valley (Grn gain; Con defence 326), Sittingbourne & Sheppey (Lab gain; Con defence 334), Honiton & Sidmouth (LD gain; Con defence 336), Herefordshire North (Grn gain; Con defence 344), Norfolk South West (Lab gain; Con defence 360), Clacton (Ref gain; Con defence 364), and Boston & Skegness (Ref gain; Con defence 371). The Conservatives had 372 on the new boundaries for 2019 if you're wondering why they're defending more seats than they won at the time.

There are two other things to now look at: the performance of the "Benjamin model" which was pretty much on the nose in 2019, and Proportional Representation.

No model would have been likely to predict these seats falling, unless they included constituency-level polling. The safest seats to fall, ranked by their swing required to be lost:

Like any half-decent psephologist, I developed my own way of analysing the election results. This does not mean I am a predictor, it means I translate polls and votes into seats theoretically. My methodology is very similar to the exit poll prior to 2015, and uses regional breakdowns of votes to apply the regional swings to each seat in turn. This isn't that accurate, but then again neither is any system.

The only way to test the model, therefore, is to use the actual election results in terms of votes, and see what that would yield in terms of seats won. In other words, as though the actual election results was like an opinion poll, done by region as per my methodology. So... what do we come up with?

Headline figures (Benjamin model): LAB 326 (-85), CON 230 (+109), LD 53 (-19), SNP 17 (+7), PC 4 (nc), GRN 1 (-3), REF 0 (-5).

Woah. That's pretty far out. Now, in 2019, I got 595 out of 632 correct and with a further 17 within a 2% swing. This election was always going to be tougher to predict, in part down to the Independents outperforming some expectations. My model still got 497 seats correct (79%), so I'm not going to throw it out yet. Now, of the 135 I got wrong, 51 were within the margin of error (a 2% swing), so that still leaves 84 outliers. I am not going to list seats where an Independent won as the model cannot, and would not have been expected, to predict them.

Unlike in 2019, I am not going to take up column inches with a seat-by-seat guide to the 84, but I will deal with them in sections here:

Scotland:

- Aberdeenshire North & Moray East (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: SNP Gain from Con)

- Alloa & Grangemouth (our forecast: SNP hold; actual result: Lab gain from SNP)

- Falkirk (our forecast: SNP hold; actual result: Lab gain from SNP)

- Inverness, Skye, and West Rossshire (our forecast: SNP hold; LD gain from SNP)

- Stirling and Strathallan (our forecast: SNP hold; Lab gain from SNP)

North:

- Blackpool North & Fleetwood (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Bolton West (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Carlisle (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Congleton (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Keighley & Ilkley (our forecast: Lab gain from Con; actual result: Con hold)

- Morecambe & Lunesdale (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Northumberland North (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Pendle & Clitheroe (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Penrith & Solway (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Ribble Valley (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Selby (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

Well done Robbie Moore! Everything else is simply Labour outperforming the swing, with the exception of Selby, which was gained in a by-election and thus the incumbent there was actually Labour.

Midlands:

- Amber Valley (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Ashfield (our forecast: Lab gain from Con; actual result: Ref gain from Con)

- Boston & Skegness (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Ref gain from Con)

- Cannock Chase (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Derbyshire Dales (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Derbyshire South (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Dudley (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Herefordshire North (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Grn gain from Con)

- Kettering (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Leicester East (our forecast: Lab hold; actual result: Con gain from Lab)

- Leicestershire North West (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Lichfield (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Mansfield (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Redditch (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Shropshire North (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Stoke-on-Trent South (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Stourbridge (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Stratford-on-Avon (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Tamworth (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Warwickshire North and Bedworth (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Wellingborough & Rushden (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

Two of my Parliamentary staff friends will loathe this. Sorry! Ashfield was a huge outlier as the Conservative majority was so small it was almost destined to be a Labour gain but Lee Anderson did a good job there to give Reform a gain. Boston & Skegness, as outlined above, was an incredibly safe seat and it was unlikely to have fallen. The only thing was the lack of Reform candidate in 2019, meaning it was difficult to establish just how safe it was. Some more by-election and independent madness in Leicester East, Shropshire North, Tamworth, and Wellingborough & Rushden.

Wales:

- Monmouthshire (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Montgomeryshire & Glyndwr (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

Montgomeryshire & Glyndwr saw a huge 20.1% swing from Conservative to Labour, compared to a theoretical swing in Wales of 7.1%. What on earth happened there!?

London:

- Bexleyheath & Crayford (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Chelsea & Fulham (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Cities of London & Westminster (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Finchley & Golders Green (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Sutton & Cheam (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Uxbridge & Ruislip South (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

As noted above in the big Lib Dem drops, three of these seats (Chelsea & Fulham, Cities of London & Westminster, and Finchley & Golders Green) had strong Lib Dem challenges in 2019 but this time they fell away - the three biggest Lib Dem drops in the country - and (tactically?) switched their allegiances to Labour. The hotly-contested Uxbridge & Ruislip South by-election in 2023 reduced this majority heavily and thus people may have voted differently at the general election to how they would have done had there not been a by-election the previous year.

South:

- Aldershot (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Ashford (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Basildon South & Thurrock East (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Ref gain from Con)

- Bracknell (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Bristol Central (our forecast: Lab hold; actual result: Grn gain from Lab)

- Bury St Edmunds & Stowmarket (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Cambridgeshire North West (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Chatham & Aylesford (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Chesham & Amersham (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Chichester (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Clacton (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Ref gain from Con)

- Cornwall South East (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Dartford (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Dorset South (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Forest of Dean (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Gillingham & Rainham (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Godalming & Ash (our forecast: LD gain from Con; actual result: Con hold)

- Gravesham (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Great Yarmouth (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Ref gain from Con)

- Hampshire North East (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Honiton & Sidmouth (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Horsham (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Isle of Wight West (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Maidenhead (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Norfolk South West (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Poole (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Portsmouth North (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Reading West & Berkhire Mid (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Rochester & Strood (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Sittingbourne & Sheppey (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Lab gain from Con)

- Tewkesbury (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Tiverton & Minehead (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

- Waveney Valley (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: Grn gain from Con)

- Witney (our forecast: Con hold; actual result: LD gain from Con)

So this is where the model let us down a bit, especially in the South East! Some by-election and Reform madness as outlined above again (Basildon South & Thurrock East, Chesham & Amersham, Clacton, Great Yarmouth, Honiton & Sidmouth, Tiverton & Minehead). 

And finally - proportional representation...

Under PR using Regional Party List, the only method by which we can ascertain results due to not knowing transferable votes (obviously), we get the following:

Scotland: CON 7, LAB 21, LD 5, REF 4, GRN 2, SNP 18

North East: CON 6, LAB 13, LD 1, REF 6, GRN 1

North West: CON 14, LAB 33, LD 5, REF 12, GRN 5 (+3 for "others")

Yorkshire: CON 12, LAB 23, LD 4, REF 9, GRN 4 (+2 for "others")

East Midlands: CON 14, LAB 17, LD 3, REF 9, GRN 3 (+1 for "others")

West Midlands: CON 16, LAB 20, LD 5, REF 11, GRN 3 (+2 for "others")

Wales: CON 6, LAB 13, LD 2, REF 5, GRN 1, PC 5

London: CON 16, LAB 33, LD 8, REF 6, GRN 7 (+5 for "others")

East Anglia: CON 19, LAB 18, LD 8, REF 11, GRN 4 (+1 for "others")

South East: CON 28, LAB 23, LD 20, REF 13, GRN 6 (+1 for "others")

South West: CON 17, LAB 14, LD 15, REF 8, GRN 4

Total: CON 155, LAB 228, LD 76, REF 94, GRN 40, SNP 18, PC 5, OTH 15

Unlike in 2019 it is hard to know what to do with the "others" (because there weren't any others winning seats under this system in 2019). If we exclude them from the House altogether you now need just 318 seats to win a majority.

That's still one very messy hung Parliament. Of course it would depend entirely on what the Lib Dems want to do, but one cannot imagine them joining another coalition any time soon. A Labour/Green/SNP/PC coalition gives 291, whilst a Conservative/Reform coalition gives 249. The Lib Dems would have to jump in with that incredibly busy coalition on the Left, giving that bloc 367 seats and a majority of 84 (with a 326 threshold). But of course then the Green/SNP/PC bloc, who have campaigned together in the past, could collapse that government at any time... Like it or not, First Past The Post did its job and we have a strong and stable government that we would not have had under PR.

I am of course open to any questions. 

Victory of the Marsupials

And here we all are at last. The 30,000-word diatribe which will make for a shredder's field day in Westminster next week has finally been published. If nothing else it will make for a lovely supply of toilet paper for some others.

I will try to keep this brief.

The intention of my piece is not to convince you whether Boris Johnson lied or not. I suspect many people made up their mind on that 18 months ago when these allegations first emerged. The intention of this piece is to highlight some of the more extreme excrescences from the report, some of the incredibly bizarre conclusions and suggestions, and - most importantly - why I believe MPs should reject the recommendations when it comes to a vote on Monday.

The first thing to note is that "illegal" does not appear in the report once. "Unlawful" appears four times - twice in direct quotes from Boris Johnson. This report, clearly, was written by a lawyer. This looks like it was a deliberate attempt to avoid being transparently in conflict with the Met Police's investigation; the rest of the report does do so, but since it does not outwardly use those terms it suggests the editors got their digital red pens in order before publishing. (Notably, they didn't do this with an earlier evidence bundle and accidentally leaked a bunch of confidential email addresses by mistake. I can corroborate this because I happened to notice that myself before it was taken down.)

It is important to note the only thing Boris Johnson was ever penalised for by the Metropolitan Police (and Rishi Sunak, for that matter) was a surprise birthday celebration, which, in the eyes of many, is the least egregious "event" that occurred, so for this to be the one event where Johnson's attendance was unlawful - in his words - "boggled my mind".

In any case, as I have said before, this is not about trying to convince you about him lying to the House or otherwise. But it is an important pretext.

Where I have concerns are as follows:

 

1. Criticism of criticism

The Owen Paterson affair, whereby MPs voted against the Standards Committee's recommendation to suspend Owen Paterson for lobbying offences, should have led to reform of the Standards and Privileges Committees. It didn't. Once a matter is referred by the House to the Committee(s) they are given a blank cheque to do as they see fit, it seems. MPs have no way to express concerns about how the Committee conducts itself, the manner in which they are operating, the line of questioning taken in oral evidence - anything. They get a motion to accept the report or otherwise.

"from the outset of this inquiry there has been a sustained attempt, seemingly co-ordinated, to undermine the Committee’s credibility and, more worryingly, that of those Members serving on it. The Committee is concerned that if these behaviours go unchallenged, it will be impossible for the House to establish such a Committee to conduct sensitive and important inquiries in the future. [...] We will be making a Special Report separately to the House dealing with these matters."

This suggests that criticism of how the Committee has operated is to be censured, and I think that is fundamentally wrong. A Select Committee cannot be prosecutor, judge, and jury with a blank cheque as they currently are. MPs who have expressed concerns about the committee throughout the process - on all sides - must be allowed to be heard.

2. Does the Punishment fit the Crime? 

 

The committee recommend (essentially) that Boris Johnson be banned from Westminster and he ought to have been suspended for 90 days. That's three times as long as Margaret Ferrier deliberately breaking Covid rules to board a train. That's nearly twice as long as Rob Roberts's sexual offences. I'm not sure lying - however serious - can be considered worse than sex offences, but yet the two SNP MPs on the committee wanted Boris Johnson expelled - EXPELLED! - from Parliament for life. If that is not a witch-hunt, I simply don't know what is.

So let us consider the "crime". The crime is, allegedly, that he lied to the House, in the view of the committee. That's all. He didn't murder anyone. He didn't deliberately infect anyone with Covid. He didn't rape anyone. He didn't make unwanted sexual advances on junior staffers. No, he said some words which (the Committee believes) were deliberately untrue.

If you believe that merits permanent expulsion from the House and sexual offences don't, then I simply think you should give your head a wobble.

3. The suggestion that we shouldn't have "waited for Sue Gray"

One of the weirdest conclusions in the report is the suggestion that Boris Johnson should not have told MPs to wait for the Gray Report, and should have prejudiced it:

"Mr Johnson [...] misled the House [...] when he gave the impression that there needed to be an investigation by Sue Gray before he could answer questions."

Frankly, I am baffled by this conclusion. To preclude the result of a Cabinet Office inquiry, much of which was subject to Police investigations, would have been sub judice. A little bit of insider trading here, but the Speaker of the House, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has been extremely careful on the matter of sub judice topics. Indeed, even today I received an email (as a listed member of staff) from the Table Office looking to query about a question my boss has tabled, cautioning him not to refer to ongoing Police investigations and matters. (I am not the Parliamentary Assistant, so I have no idea what said question is.)

I am sure of it Boris Johnson was advised not to comment on an ongoing investigation, not just by his lawyers, but likely by the Police and Sue Gray herself. The Committee's suggestion that therefore saying "wait for Sue Gray" was misleading the House is truly, truly bizarre.

4. The suggestion that Boris Johnson lied to the Committee

This is an incredibly serious allegation. To lie under oath is a criminal offence in a court of law. However, no evidence is presented in the report to this extent. The entire extent of the suggestion he lied to the Committee is that when he said he was "repeatedly" assured, they wanted, er, a more accurate and specific definition of what "repeatedly" meant, and thus they have selectively chosen to define it in a way not consistent with the dictionary.

If I were an MP I would not accept this report for these specific reasons.

Parties, Conspiracies, and Wine-Time Fridays: thoughts on "Partygate"

"If the poll tax was the reason she fell, Europe was the reason she wasn't able to get up again."

Modern-day commentators like to say that the poll tax is the reason why Margaret Thatcher was forced from office in 1990. The reality was it was not the big poll tax, it was the straw of Howe's resignation over Europe that broke the camel's back. Likewise with Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, the actual reason for their resignation will not be that which the public remembers. For many, Liz Truss had to go because of the growth plan and the fallout. In reality it was a series of political messes including a total fuss on whipping on both the Public Order Bill and a Labour opposition motion on fracking.

It is important to state that "partygate" (a horrid term) is not why Boris Johnson was forced from office. It was a coup instigated by Rishi Sunak over an error of judgement Johnson had made in a reshuffle some five months earlier by appointing Chris Pincher to a deputy whip. Sunak tries to slither away from partygate, for he was fined for his misdemeanours too, so could not cite partygate as a factor.

As I write this we are around 16 hours away from the most hotly-anticipated committee appearance of the year (oh the joys of being in the "bubble"!) and Boris Johnson's submission to the privileges committee has finally been published, nearly 24 hours after it was submitted.

I have been very critical of Sue Gray in recent weeks and I believe her conduct has been shameful, unbecoming of a civil servant in speaking to Labour whilst working at DLUHC. Unfortunately the media (and therefore the public) only link her with partygate. I do not believe, at this stage, she compromised partygate. What she may have compromised is the Social Housing (Regulation) and Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bills, one of which I have a vested interest in, which is why it is hugely important Starmer and/or Gray reveal when she began talking to Labour. It is, admittedly, a very SW1A story, but the Gray affair with Labour is not about partygate. I hope I have made that crystal clear.

Taking Johnson's statement in conjunction with the Gray report there does appear to be a clear and consistent version of events that seems to back Boris Johnson up.

- The Covid-19 procedures at No10 were different to all other workplaces;
- Anything Johnson attended he clearly did not believe was a "party";
- The evidence proves Johnson was told, repeatedly, that no rules were broken with respect to anything he didn't attend;
- Advisors and civil servants have serious questions to answer.

I want to explore each of these in turn.

This first point is crucial. 

The amount of groupthink that went on, in both the Gray report and Johnson's defence submission, is extraordinary. Johnson's riposte to the committee's suggestion that rule breaches should have been "obvious" plays into this, perhaps more so than Johnson and his lawyers think. As Johnson highlights, if it were "obvious" that rules were being broken, particularly in respect of 19 June 2020 (the surprise birthday sandwiches, the only event for which the Met fined both Johnsons and Rishi Sunak), we are talking about not the failure of one person but that of dozens including the Number 10 photographer and the people who briefed it to The Times for the following day's edition. Number 10 was, for obvious reasons, a workplace allowed to stay open during the pandemic lockdowns, even in the first lockdown when a lot of places shut their doors. Johnson has highlighted in his submission the workplace guidance, as applied to Number 10. Given the layout of the building social distancing was not always viable: having visited Number 10 myself for work reasons last year, this is not a surprise to me. Indeed, it's a great spot by his lawyers that found the guidance said social distancing was an "objective" rather than a rule. There has also been nothing found to have been illegal in the use of alcohol at desks, although Gray criticised this culture in her report.

This therefore suggests that the lines between what was legal and illegal, lawful and unlawful somewhat blurred. I would like to put that question to key workers who worked in the first lockdown. My ex-boyfriend is one such person. If a No10 official pulls the wine out of a cupboard and asks everyone to have a glass at their desks as a toast to a colleague leaving, or a major accomplishment, is that unlawful? Is that illegal? The Metropolitan Police didn't seem to think so.

It is sufficiently blurry to lend credibility to the suggestion Johnson did not attend a "party" at any point. Indeed, he was not fined for anything outside of the surprise birthday - I have always said this was the least egregious event so for him to be fined for this and nothing else has always struck me as odd. It is a point Johnson has also raised in his defence, that no rationale has ever been provided by the Met for why some people were fined for a certain event and not other people, and vice versa, although he stops short of disputing the fine.

Regardless, that is not what the committee's investigation is about.

These arguments about what was legal, what was illegal, what was lawful, what was unlawful - that's a matter for the Metropolitan Police and their investigation concluded last year. Insofar as they are concerned, the door on this affair is now closed and there is no suggestion of any further criminal sanctions for Boris Johnson, Carrie Johnson, Rishi Sunak, or anybody else.

It is only the Privileges Committee, egged on by the media, that is keeping this matter open. One consistent factor across this affair is just how long this has taken. We are talking some 15 months since the initial reports of these events were published by the Daily Mirror and 11 months since the committee was asked to investigate whether Johnson lied to the House.

The legality is important as it provides background and context into what Johnson knew when he made statements to the House, the veracity of which is the subject of the Committee's investigation - no more, no less.

For politicians, lying to Parliament, especially the House of Commons, is the worst offence you can make. You are expected to resign any frontbench post and the House may decide to recommend your suspension from the House outright for a number of days. The Recall of MPs Act, a major coalition reform, could, if the suspension is long enough, instigate a petition to force a by-election in Boris Johnson's constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Ironically, the Conservatives know all this to their cost with a complete cock-up involving Owen Paterson in October 2021. (Paterson denied the paid lobbying charges laid at him by the Standards Committee and the Government decided it didn't agree with them either so told its MPs to vote against a suspension so the case could be reopened. Ultimately this backfired drastically but has led to the beginnings of reforming the committee.) Resultantly, Rishi Sunak is right to make any findings against Boris Johnson a free vote - i.e. one that he is not going to "whip".

It plays into the groupthink regarding the rules and guidance more generally that Johnson states in his defence he and his team did not even consider this matter for PMQs on 1 December 2021. He admits therefore that he was surprised when Keir Starmer chose the initial party reports as his main line of attack: they expected him to talk about Omicron. The piecemeal way in which the Mirror, ITV, and the Guardian opted to drip-feed evidence not only meant Starmer only asked about the 18 December 2020 party (Johnson was not involved in this event in any way and it is (or at least should be) generally accepted he has no personal culpability for it).

The WhatsApp records Johnson provides, as well as a transcript of then Director of Communications Jack Doyle's interview with Sue Gray, suggests either Doyle and James Slack (then "Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson" and essentially deputy DCom) lied to Boris Johnson that no rules were broken or that Doyle was mistaken in believing no rules were broken.

No documentary evidence has ever been provided that Johnson was told that anything was wrong and I want to take this opportunity to criticise the way the media have acted. The media have seized on out-of-context quotations and sought to make a political soap opera out the affair. Much attention was focused on Martin Reynolds' comment that they "got away with it" regarding the "bring your own booze" event on 20 May 2020 but this comment is in relation to communications management and is discussed extensively in the Gray report, Lee Cain explicitly saying he is sure it's legal, but doesn't look good and ultimately this is a key point for the public at large: it is not about what they did and whether it was legal or not; it is about how it looks to them.

The piecemeal way the left-wing media broke new developments in the story suggests someone either had a large file they passed to the Mirror/Guardian/ITV, or given three organisations were getting exclusives, I believe the leaker themselves was doing the piecemealing. It is a common trick which has been used in journalism and is partly why large-scale leaks don't tend to create a huge media storm. The best example of historical precedent here is the MPs' expenses scandal. In early May 2009 the Telegraph was given the complete list of MPs' expenses claims, which included well-publicised events such as moat cleaning, new TVs, dog food, et cetera. Rather than dump a huge file on an unsuspecting public, they drip-fed the coverage over several weeks which allowed more and more "fresh" outrage. The Telegraph, at the time of writing, are doing a similar thing with Matt Hancock's WhatsApp messages: if one were to publish all 100,000 of them in one go the Telegraph would be relying on the media picking up on their own narratives, rather than controlling the narrative themselves.

This allowed one person to control the narrative on partygate, clearly taking Number 10 by surprise: as proved by the fact no documentation has ever been discovered that warned Boris Johnson of wrongdoing.

Resultantly, insofar as the committee's investigation is concerned, the only conclusion can be that this statement was truthful as he knew it to be at the time (my emphasis). It relates to the Allegra Stratton video, on which I will expand more in due course:

I repeat that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no covid rules were broken. That is what I have been repeatedly assured. 

 - Boris Johnson, 8 December 2021
(Hansard)

This is one of the statements the committee wants to investigate and the evidence suggests, conclusively in my mind, this statement from Johnson is not a lie. The only person who disputes this is the discredited Dominic Cummings, who - regardless of his backstabbing and openly-Sunak-coup-supporting machinations - has been challenged repeatedly to prove his statement he did warn Johnson about the events, but has so far refused to do so, suggesting such evidence does not exist. He insists it does - if so, he must bring it to the committee's attention or the committee must assume it does not exist.

The other answer to Parliament that the committee want to investigate is this:

Catherine West: Will the Prime Minister tell the House whether there was a party in Downing Street on 13 November?

Boris Johnson: No, but I am sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.

8 December 2021
(Hansard) 

In his submission to the committee Johnson admits this is not his finest ever answer at PMQs, to put it mildly. As outlined above, the correct answer to this, objectively, is it depends on what one calls a "party" and it is equally clear that Number 10 officials did not consider leaving drinks a "party" at any point although many "outside" might well do. Is the suggestion that Johnson was expected to know that? The committee seem to think so, but as outlined above Downing Street clearly thought not.

There is, however, one question that remains unanswered, and cannot be answered by Boris Johnson or any politician. It is the Allegra Stratton and Ed Olding internal video of 22 December 2020, in which Olding, playing the role of a journalist, asks Stratton about the events of 18 December 2020, to which they laugh at each other. (By way of background, Stratton was hired as a US-style press secretary, and this was a "dry run" of such a press conference, but the idea was later dropped. Stratton remained on in a new role relating to COP26 but resigned after this leak.)

The video apparently undermines the central claim that no one thought any rules were being broken at any point. There are only three possibilities for what happens now:

- Stratton/Olding told Doyle/Slack/Reynolds at the time and Doyle/Slack/Reynolds hid this from Johnson;

I do not believe this to be likely, unless Reynolds and co. have also lied to the committee and Sue Gray, but this latter suggestion is not only implausible, it is also potentially illegal. They would have known they cannot lie in formal submissions to Gray, lest they lose their jobs at the very least. 

I honestly don’t think that anyone who was in that room was breaking any rules. They were with their colleagues who they sat with all day every day for 12 hours. Were there additional elements to that? Yes. That was a reflection of the specific circumstances of the end of the year. Everyone in the office knew that they were public servants and wouldn’t have done it if they thought they were breaking rules.

- James Slack, 10 December 2021
(submission to Gray, as cited in Johnson, 2023: 35). 

- Stratton/Olding/others hid their rule-breaking from Doyle/Slack/Reynolds and lied to them;

This is the likeliest option and provides reasoning for why Stratton jumped at the first opportunity. However, much of the public would consider this unlikely that the rule-breaking was somehow widespread but kept from political advisors in Jack Doyle, James Slack, and Martin Reynolds. It is, however, the most likely option.

- Stratton, Olding, Doyle, Reynolds, Slack, and Johnson were all "in on it" and tried to cover it all up.

The last option is unlikely. Number 10 staff are not political appointees (largely speaking) but are civil servants, many of whom it is no secret didn't think much of Johnson and would have liked to see him go. If the civil servants ever suspected Johnson was withholding anything you could be sure it would be leaked to the press. That this didn't happen suggests it is unlikely there was an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy.

The committee, in my view, must rule that Johnson did not lie to the House.

----
Further reading:

Gray, S., 2022. Findings of Second Permanent Secretary's Investigation into Alleged Gatherings on Government Premises During Covid Restrictions. London: Cabinet Office.
Hansard HC Deb. vol.705 cols.371-2, 8 December 2021.
Hansard HC Deb. vol.705 col.379, 8 December 2021.
Johnson, A. B. D. P., 2023. In the Matter Referred to the House of Commons Committee of Privileges on 21 April 2022. London: House of Commons Committee of Privileges.

How to be affected by Covid, without being infected by Covid

What is the point of text blogs any more? No one does them. They're all doing vlogs instead. Vlogs, on YouTube, which, for some people, net them millions of people watching their things on an almost daily basis.

I can't do that. I look awful on camera. Yeah, yeah, Countdown and all that, but it's true what they say about the camera, and it really does add 10lb.

I knew that from the moment my interview on Zoom started yesterday. Dear god, I looked fat. I looked so ugly. And I knew that the moment the interview started.

I felt that interview went well, and having already made it through two rounds of selection processes, I almost felt it was in the bag. Rejections hurt more the closer you are to making it.

...

OK, OK, I should probably back up a little bit.

I'm currently re-watching Sex Education on Netflix at 1am. It's only my brother and I alone in the house this week; my parents have gone on holiday.

Yeah... I still live with my parents.

It seems to me that life has been a sequence of 12-month periods, each more shitty and worse than the last. This is a sequence that has gone on for, well, 7 years or so now. Mistakes that I made in 2014, 2015, 2016 have created irreparable damage to my life, and I feel like I'm going round in a circle with whatever I write here, almost like I cannot put my thoughts into words adequately.

I'm also not afraid to admit I'm a very proud person. I like to portray the parts of me that I want others to see. And that's a double-edged sword. Because you can create an image of yourself, and someone else gets to know that version of you, the version you want them to see, and one day, you will let your guard down, and when that happens, people won't want to know you any more.

I am, however, a very honourable person, so I'm not about to name names or spill any juice about people individually. Not in, despite the limited numbers that will actually read this, is still publicly available, so no, I'm not going to be Coleen Rooney. Or whoever it was that exposed Rebekah Vardy. I'm not really a tabloid soap opera guy.

But I do need to rant. I do need to vent. Each period of 12 months gets worse and worse.

So, here goes.

...

March 2020.

In the space of about 3 weeks, my circumstances perhaps matched those of the entire country. From normality, to worry, to pure chaos, to optimism, to wartime spirit...

... to pessimism and a sense it will never end.

My uni life was pretty good. Solid, if unspectacular, I'll admit. It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one who knew me from school that I had no friends that wanted me to live with them. Cue years of piggybacking off Facebook ads, and in the 18-19 and 19-20 years living in the 10th and spare room of a house. I was probably paying too much for what it was. The spare room, which I'm 90% sure used to be a cupboard. It was a nice house, I felt, although perhaps could do with a full refurbishment. The carpets were getting old, and given the house was ex-flats, it was a house whose capacity was very much vertical rather than in any of the other two directions. Being ex-flats, each room had an en suite bathroom. As I was in a cupboard, the en suite had not moved, so "my" bathroom was in the living room, or off the living room, or whatever the correct description is, I've never seen Grand Designs. That meant I was always cleaning up the bathroom that everyone - including numerous house parties - would use.

But despite all its many shortcomings, it was, in my mind anyway, my home. My place where I could shut off, let my guard down, away from pressures of family, from university, from politics, from cricket, from housing, from rent, from... everything.

The events of March 2020 are burnt into my brain for that reason. My uni life post-election was cricket, academia, and relaxation. It was almost like the pieces of my life were starting to fall into place, owning my own destiny, for once, and perhaps, just perhaps... things were going well?

7 March 2020. University of Sussex Cricket Club Alumni Day. Two games of indoor cricket against some of the recent leavers, many of whom I knew as they had only just left, two wonderfully crazy periods of scoring and spectating. Then we went out afterwards. Oh, what a night. £60 spent, amazingly. Drunk as tits. Might have fallen over on the 100-yard walk back to my house... it was the last time that I perhaps experienced normality, without any mention, in normal life, of coronavirus.

Monday 9 March 2020. I noticed a couple of paranoid people, wiping down surfaces in the entire seminar room. There was also a rumour that someone couldn't attend as he had coronavirus - oh, but not to worry, he'd just come back from Italy.

Friday 13 March 2020. Had the memorial service of a very distant relative. Probably best if I don't get into the details, but given we were relatives of my aunt's first husband, someone commented it was a little odd that we were invited to attend the memorial of my aunt's second husband. It wasn't really that odd, when we thought about it at the time. Because we had always been so close together to an aunt who has not been related to us for 20 years. In hindsight, this was a bit of a superspreader event for Covid, but I tend not to think about that too much. The cancelling of football that day was perhaps the first sign that this wasn't going to just go away in a hurry.

Saturday 14 March 2020. Cricket training. Saturday lunchtimes, September to April. 12pm-2pm. Varsity due in one week's time. For once I was not disappointed to not be selected for a cricket game: indoor cricket is really not my skillset as it is like T20 on steroids. All defensive, no attack with the ball. And my style of batting (Cook meets Burns meets Sibley meets Gillespie) has no place in a one day game, let alone a 10-over indoor game. So I was looking forward to, for the first time in ages, going into scoring a match without yearning to be on the field. On the hall. In the hall...? But I sat down in the changing room, joked about elbow bumping a bit (in hindsight, laughing my way through this crisis was probably my way of dealing with it), but I did say one thing to someone. I had/have a huge crush on this guy, which isn't necessarily helpful when you're friends with them, but at least he knew that and (unlike previous crushes) hadn't run a mile, which is always a good sign. But I just said to him... "I don't think we're going to be here this time next week."

Monday 16 March 2020. For once, this term, I didn't have a Monday 9am seminar, which was good, as I'm not a morning person. At all. But at about 9:40am the email I had been dreading came through: due to coronavirus, all teaching had been suspended. But surely this wouldn't last long, right? Maybe a couple of weeks, I'd be back, I'd get a couple of good contact hours in April or maybe even May (although that's cutting it fine) so I could sit through with my tutors and actually work out what the fuck I was going to do with my dissertations... right?

Wednesday 18 March 2020. Playing cricket is banned for the foreseeable future by the ECB. So with no cricket and no University for now, I'll go and stay with my parents for a bit. One reason for this: it's just cheaper. I don't have to pay for food, I don't have to pay for travel...

Other than the one day I would move out, little did I know I would never see my house in Brighton again.

Monday 23 March 2020. I am connected. I am plugged into the Matrix. I know my sources. My Twitter feed is, actually, pretty well laid out. So I knew what Boris Johnson was going to say at 8pm. We were getting the worst thing, the worst option available. Lockdown. But it's fine. It'll only be a few weeks. And we'll come out in one go, we'll be straight back to normal in 3 or 4 weeks time.

...

And look at where we are now. In those 2-3 weeks I lost everything I had in my life. Between 16 March 2020 and my dissertation deadlines in May/June (I honestly forget now exactly when they were) my contact hours were... 5 minutes over the phone. We didn't have Zoom classes yet. 5 minutes. That was it. I am proud of what I got in my dissertations all things considered, but Covid ruined my degree. I should have done better.

I have, to this day, never had a formal graduation. But since the results came through in June 2020, I have not had a job. And I don't think that is for lack of trying. I have lost count of the amount of job applications I have sent off. In all walks of life. In all honesty, I could probably open my sent items folder and have a count, but why would I want to do that? It's just so depressing for me to sit there, go through 13 months of applications, and... count them. But we're talking at least 100, I would have thought.

Sidenote: it's 2:35am now and I am running out of energy. Basically, need job, need money, need validation in my life and sympathy when I need it. And in my opinion, Covid took that all away from me.

Will Biden win? US Election 2020

Four years on from 2016, and we're back looking at polls, swings, gains, losses, etc. Well, in a way, it's only one year on from the last time we did this for the 2019 UK General Election.

First, let's get the disclaimer out of the way: I am not a predictor; I am merely attempting to interpret the polls in terms of seats electoral college votes. In 2016, this is something that I had great success with in a way. The takeaway point in 2016 was that the swing in the marginal states was higher than the national swing, which was enough to push Donald Trump into the White House. https://rhysbenjamin.blogspot.com/2016/11/how-did-trump-win.html

However, Trump has a very difficult task if he wants to stay there.

Theoretically, the swing that Biden needs to win is just 0.4%. That's 4 out of every 1,000 Trump 2016 voters going to Biden in 2020. You can also see this in his "easiest" path to the White House: gain Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

What we actually find is that, as with 2016, the current swing in marginals appears to be bigger than the national swing. If we use the swingometer we see that if we place the arrow on what the polls say is the national swing, 2.8% (using the average of the different "poll of polls" models, so basically the poll of poll of polls). On a uniform national swing Joe Biden will get a landslide, looking at 350 electoral college votes to 188. 

But what are the "marginal" states in this election? It's time to have a look at...

THE BATTLEGROUND.

This is where the election will be won and lost. These are the states in their 2016 colours, with the white line representing, to an extent, Joe Biden's "winning" post. Starting on 232 electoral votes, he needs to gain Michigan (+16), Pennsylvania (+20), and Wisconsin (+10), if he does it in order of difficulty, to get over the 270 line, because, of course, 232 + 16 + 20 + 10 = 278. 

If Biden gains Florida, that means, however, he can afford to lose any two of those three states and still win the election. Even Florida + Wisconsin gives Biden 271. If Biden loses all three of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, however, or indeed if Trump makes gains (not currently predicted, it has to be said), in any of these seven targets below, then Biden's task becomes harder.

Looking at the polls across these states, however, the average swing on the current statewide polls is 3.5%, and if you weight these polls by electoral college vote, then the swing in marginals is 3.0%. This indicates that Trump is doing slightly better in the safe seats, but they're no good to him as they're unlikely to be unseated. Sorry, safe "states".

So on election night, here is your cut-out-and-keep guide to the battleground. Mark these off as they are declared, and you will have an idea of what is happening. Trump's easier states to win are at the bottom, and Biden's are at the top, with the white line representing the winning point on either side. As these come in, you should be able to tell who's winning.

Here's one more pic dump, Trump's target list:

Not paid for by either campaign. Just some independent research.