Boris Johnson’s Double Gamble on an Unpredictable U.K. Election
Boris Johnson’s Double Gamble on an Unpredictable U.K. Election
(Bloomberg) -- Will it be the most wonderful time of the year for Boris Johnson?
If he gets his December election, the U.K. prime minister would be taking a double gamble. Not only would he be holding it at a time of year when elections haven’t been held in modern times, but he would also be going in with the defining issue of his premiership unresolved. That makes the outcome all the harder for traders to predict.
Take the polls. With Brexit set to be delayed until Jan. 31, Johnson still faces the threat that Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party will siphon off Leave voters. But Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s ambiguous stance on Brexit means he may be unable to gain from tactical voting by Remainers. A surge by the Liberal Democrats under Jo Swinson, who has promised to stop Brexit, could complicate the result further.
But Anthony Wells, director of political research at YouGov, warned against reading too much into polls based on hypothetical questions -- such as asking how people will vote if Brexit is delayed.
“Polls measure current public opinion. They can’t predict the future,” he said on Twitter. “While you can ask respondents to predict their own future opinions, they aren’t necessarily very good at it.”
A December election would be the first since 1923 -- which produced a hung parliament. Parties traditionally avoid winter votes because it’s harder to canvass support after dark and they have to get people out in to the cold to go to polling stations.
For the Conservatives, holding an election while students aren’t at university -- where they are typically registered to vote -- could be an advantage, as James Forsyth of the Spectator notes:
The Times notes that the register of voters only gets updated at the start of December. That means that poll cards will go out to electors on the old lists -- but staff at the polling stations will be using the new ones. Will people be prevented from voting?
Johnson’s plan still needs the support two-thirds of members of Parliament, something that he has failed to get on two previous occasions. If he succeeds this time, the result could be hard to predict.
After all, his predecessor Theresa May also called an election in 2017 to seek a bigger majority for her Brexit plan, and that gamble backfired spectacularly when she lost her House of Commons majority.
To contact the reporter on this story: Edward Evans in London at eevans3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Heather Harris at hharris5@bloomberg.net, Thomas Penny, Stuart Biggs
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