POLL BOOST FOR TORIES
PM TIPPED FOR WIN BY EXPERTS WHO PREDICTED 2017 STALEMATE
BORIS JOHNSON and the Tories are on course to win the election, according to pollsters who called it right in 2017. The prime minister is set to bag a hefty majority of 68 with 359 MPs, while Labour will have 211, the SNP 43 and the Lib Dems 13, shows the most detailed analysis of the campaign so far.
The Tories are forecast to take 44 Labour seats, including in their rival’s heartlands of the North and the Midlands. The You Gov ‘mega-poll’ correctly forecast the hung parliament two years ago, while also accurately predicting Labour wins in long-held Tory constituencies such as Canterbury and Kensington and Chelsea. It is based on interviews with about 100,000 voters over the last seven days.
And it also factors in detailed data about the backgrounds and lifestyles of people in specific areas to work out which party they are likely to back – a method known as ‘multilevel regression and post-stratification’. Before the results were released, however, the PM’s senior adviser
Dominic Cummings warned the election in two weeks’ time would be much closer than other polls have suggested.
The strategist, believed to have formally stepped down so he can comment without breaking civil service impartiality rules, said: ‘As someone who has worked on lots of campaigns, there is a very real possibility of a hung parliament.’
Sterling rose against the dollar on the poll result.
Meanwhile, Mr Johnson said sorry for the ‘hurt and offence’ caused by Tory Islamophobia as Jeremy Corbyn resisted calls for him to offer an apology over anti-Semitism in Labour.
The prime minister promised that an independent inquiry into ‘every manner of prejudice and discrimination’ in his party would start before Christmas.
But he refused calls to apologise for comparing Muslim women who wear the niqab to letterboxes in a Daily Telegraph column he wrote last year. On a visit to
Cornwall, he said: ‘Obviously whenever we have an incident of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia or whatever in the Conservative Party we take a zero tolerance approach.
‘We have a one-bounce-and-we-dealwith-it approach to this.’ But the Muslim Council of Britain named Tory election candidates who are standing as MPs despite facing allegations.
It mentioned Lincoln hopeful Karl McCartney, who apologised on Monday for retweeting anti-Muslim comments by far-right extremists Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson.
‘The PM goes around saying “people are out on the first bounce”, but there’s example after example that that’s not the case,’ said MCB spokesman Miqdaad Versi.
The Tories yesterday suspended Flora Scarabello, candidate for Glasgow Central, over alleged anti-Muslim language.
Mr Corbyn said yesterday he had already said sorry ‘to all those who have suffered’ and pledged to lead ‘the most anti-racist government you’ve ever seen’.