BoJo banished - Liz Truss down. Is Rishi next for the toaster? **threadbans in OP**

Pretty astonishing they are now predicting a 2 year recession in the UK and unemployment to rise up near 6%. The damage Truss did in her short time is office was like economic suicide. Bank of England are saying they were just hours away from a run of the markets that they wouldnt have been able to prevent, thats how close it was. Truss' mini budget has put the taxpayer in the hock for billions but of course the Tory mouthpieces are blaming it all on global events, do they ever stop lying.

Worth comparing Johnson's 42% in 2019 with Jeremy Corbyn's 40% in 2017.

So, Johnson the uniquely beloved miracle vote-getter? Nah, that's balls. Always was.

Johnson did well - not amazingly well, but well - in an election in his new PM honeymoon period with a simple appealing slogan facing an unpopular opponent and an electorate that had no experience of what he would actually be like as PM. That combination of circumstances can never recur for him.

So we are right back to where Cameron was. The last 6 or so years, which was essentially an attempt to protect the conservative party from loss of support to UKIP, have been a complete waste of time, money and effort.

Now the whole country is worse off because the Tory party wanted the country to pay for their own internal argument.

UKIP, Farage really, bottled it at the last election. He had likely support but dropped out to allow the Tories a free hand and since then they have done nothing but complain about it.

Ironically all down to FPtP which many on the UK rightwing refuse to believe is undemocratic

Yes, it's the same tactics used by UKIP, which also won basically no seats but succeeded in doing a management buy-out of the Tory party.

But of course this means that the Tories have been here before. They know where accepting the hard right management buyout offer gets them; it gets them to here — five PMs in six years, and 21% in the polls. Madness to imagine that yielding to Reform pressure will work out any better for them than yielding to UKIP pressure did. To rebuild, they need to appear credible to middle-ground voters. There was a time when that was compatible with being an enthusiast for hard Brexit. That time is gone.

The Tories have been held hostage by the hard right / far right wing of the party for well over a decade. Cameron was insane to think he could ever unify the party by placating them. They got greedy, kept demanding more and more until they ended up running the UK - with predictably calamitous results (the events of 2022).

Huh? Cameron's centrism is what history will remember him for most kindly - same-sec marriage, being able to construct a functional coalition with the Liberals. His legitimising of brexitry by calling the referendum, so jeopardising his country's interests in an attempt to solve an internal party problem, is one of the things history will damn him for. But he's still going to be regarded as a better prime minister than at least his three immediate successors.

If Sunak panders to the Tory right, he will lose the next election very, very badly.* And he will deserve to.

*[He's going to lose it anyway; the only question is how badly.]

You can over-analyse these things. This is the Omnisis poll, which is a small poll (c. 1200 respondents) conducted very frequently (at intervals of between a week and a fortnight). The rise in support for Reform from % to 9% looks astonishing — a 50% jump in Reform's vote — and it appears to have happened in just 8 days (between 3 Nov and 8 Nov). That should set your sceptical alarm bells ringing.

And your scepticism would be justified. Because of the small sample size the margin of error for this poll is unusually high — 3.1%, and more for "crossbreaks with very small sub-samples" (which is jargon for the groups of respondents indicating support for minor parties).

In fact, all of the shifts in support for all parties shown in this poll are within the margin of error, so if you wanted to summarise the findings of those poll in one sentence it would be "not much change since the last poll 8 days ago", which is not really a very surprising conclusion.

The shift most likely to be meaningful is not the 3% rise for Reform, but the 2% fall for Labour. Although it's a smaller shift, it's in a much larger sub-group (Labour supporters) so is more likely to mean something. But it's still within the margin of error. And, in another sense, even if it means something, it doesn't mean anything important. The Labour margin over the Tories has fallen from 24% to 23%; that's still a bloodbath for the Tories, if repeated at an election. It would be the largest margin of victory for any party since the Tories won the 1931 general election with a margin of 25.6% over Labour, winning 470 seats to Labour's 46.