Rules of thumb for understanding UK elections

Good morning. Through the magic of time travel, I am providing my own holiday cover today, writing this in London though by the time it sends I will be in Lincolnshire.

I like to look back on my mistakes over the course of the year. It doesn’t require a lot of imagination, and I think it is good intellectual hygiene as a way of spotting your own blind spots and biases. This exercise is also helpful for noticing historical trends that emerge and can sharpen your analysis. These aren’t hard-and-fast “laws of politics”, because I don’t think those exist.

But they are good rules of thumb that are right more often than they are wrong. Given that this year saw a change of government, a comparatively rare event in British politics, I thought it would be a perfect time to go through what I see as some of those.

Patterns in politics

Elections are primarily about the record of the incumbent

It’s not that campaigns and candidate choices don’t matter, but they only really matter at the margin. Most of the time, the various campaigns will all be about the same level of competence and they will therefore cancel each other out.

As a result, elections are largely about “how people feel about the condition of the country today compared with at the last election” versus “whether people are scared of the alternatives to the government”. It’s why I continue to think that the two most important politicians in the 2019 general election were Philip Hammond, former Conservative chancellor, and the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It was Hammond’s looser budgets from 2017 onwards that helped reduce the salience of public services and made it easier for Boris Johnson to fight a Brexit election. And it was Corbyn’s own unpopularity after 2018 that meant he could never unite enough Remain voters, leaving Labour at a disadvantage at the election.

Candidates and ‘issue positioning’ matter

This isn’t to say that none of the personality stuff matters. Quite the contrary. The leader matters in part because the choices they make about what to focus on and how to position their party not only change how they are perceived but also shape the core argument of that election. To return to 2017 and 2019, an election like 2017 where the question of the day became “are you happy with the condition of the country?” was better terrain for Labour than one like 2019, when it became “do you want Brexit to go ahead and do you trust Corbyn?”

The most important choices that shaped the election of 2024 were made by, in no particular order: Vladimir Putin, Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, and Sir Keir Starmer. Putin’s launching of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was outside the control of the government in 2022. The decisions made by Johnson, Truss and Sunak all undermined the government’s position. But Starmer’s conscious choice to make Labour appear less threatening and to abandon Labour’s pro-EU position helped him fight an election on the preferred territory of any political party that has been out of power for more than a decade: things are bad, we need change.

Over time, the centre of political gravity moves away from the government of the day

Public opinion is thermostatic: it moves to the left under Conservative governments and to the right under Labour ones. I think this is in large part because each party has different priorities and different blind spots. Indeed, we are living through such a dynamic at the moment: on the one hand, we have a Conservative opposition insisting that, actually, the British state does a huge amount and works basically fine; on the other, we have a Labour government that has opted to pay for that by raising taxes on businesses.

The Liberal Democrats usually win by-elections

I hope this is self-explanatory.

The Conservatives usually win general elections

Ditto. This is the humbling thing for any political analyst: over the past 100 years, you are being outperformed by a parrot that has been taught to say two things: “it will be the Tories” and “the government is usually re-elected”.

The Conservatives are usually underestimated in the polls

At an FT Live event, I was smugly pleased to have got the number of Conservative seats won in the general election right to within just one: but this was not a product of some great genius on my part, I just worked it out by putting the opinion polls into the FT’s seat projector, and increasing the Conservatives’ poll share by 3 points. (Turns out that in our pre-election survey asking you to predict how many seats the Tories would win, many Inside Politics readers also landed on a pretty accurate result!)

Just as we are being beaten by a parrot, crudely taking the polls on voting intention and going “the Conservatives are probably doing 3 points better than that” has historically been a good rule of thumb. I think that is worth remembering when we talk about Reform overtaking them as the main party of the right, as I expect we will do an awful lot next year.

Now try this

I will mostly be listening to Radio 3 Unwind and 6 Music while I cook and read this week. In terms of Christmas films, this year saw a new entry into my personal pantheon: joining When Harry Met Sally, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Apartment, The Muppet Christmas Carol, It’s A Wonderful Life and Violent Night in this year’s rotation is The Holdovers.

Thank you so much for reading this newsletter, for all your emails over the course of the year, and thank you to everyone at the FT who has helped out. There will be more from some of our guest writers but I will see you in 2025!

A very happy Christmas, however you spend it.