At the time of the Domesday Book the four largest settlement in Northamptonshire were Northampton, Brackley, Rushton and Finedon. The first two are still towns (one a great deal larger than the other) and Rushton is now a small village near Desborough Finedon, where I went today, is described as a town, though its population at the 2021 census was only 4552 and there are few shops left in its historic heart. The pub proved to be closed until six - as it was a Friday, that suggests to me that it's more of a restaurant these days - and ...
Welcome to my summary of the latest national voting intention polls for the next general election, along with the latest MRP projections and party leadership ratings. If you'd like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls: General election voting intention polls PollsterConLabLDGrnRefLab leadFieldwork Find Out Now 18% (+2) 16% (+1) 11% (nc) 20% (-1) 24% (-1) -8% (4th, vs Ref) 29/4 GB ...
At 10.30pm on Wednesday evening, I had just finished my dinner and just watched one of my favourite episodes of Dr Who (Genesis of the Daleks) when the phone rang. It was a resident of Streetgate, advising me that there were three donkeys on his drive! He asked me if I knew who owned them. The only donkeys in the Streetgate area are housed in stables near my farm. I guessed they had escaped from
The term "the anti-bedtime left" is in vogue as a way of disparaging people in the Labour Party who still have ambitions to set the people free rather than police them more closely. But I am old enough to remember the days when there was a pro-bedtime left. And this press cutting from The Scotsman (18 November 1996) is a relic of it: Bedtime Stories Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise, says New Labour. The shadow home secretary Jack Straw has called for firmer discipline at home, including set bedtimes to stop ...
The latest edition of the email newsletter for my podcast, Political Fictions, is out and you can also read it in full below. But if you'd like to get future editions emailed direct to you as soon as they are published, sign up now: [IMG: Greenland] Greenland. Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash. The latest episode of Political Fictions is out: Mark and Cory talk about Scandi Ballot Box dramas for the first time. They discuss the Borgen episode in which there are revelations about how Greenland is being used for CIA rendition programmes. They talk about whether photogenic politicians ...
I came to The West Wing late. Not when it first aired, in that long forgotten world before 9/11 when liberal democracy felt like the direction of travel rather than a rearguard action. I found it about five years ago, the way you sometimes stumble into exactly what you needed without knowing you were looking for it. Every year, I have watched it several times. My wife has opinions about this. I am not going to pretend that watching a twenty-year-old American political drama is a political act. But I want to make a genuine case for why it matters ...
Just the one principal authority council by-elections this week ahead of next week's big polling day, in Malvern Hills: Tenbury (Malvern Hills) Council By-Election Result:RFM: 45.1% (New)CON: 30.3% (-20.2)LDM: 12.7% (New)GRN: 12.0% (New)Reform GAIN from Conservative.Changes w/ 2023 — Election Maps UK (@electionmaps.uk) 2026-05-01T12:11:25.788Z Thank you to Jed Marson for being the Liberal Democrat candidate here and to him and the team for getting the party on the ballot paper here after the previous no-show. For what all this means for the running total of council by-election results since the last May elections, see my council by-elections scorecard here. These ...
This week marks the last by-election of the 2025-26 electoral cycle, and this takes us to the small Worcestershire town of Tenbury Wells. Malvern Hills DC, Tenbury This week's by-election was triggered by the resignation of Conservative councillor Andrew Willmont. He came second in this two-member seat in 2023, significantly ahead of his Conservative running-mate, representing Tenbury alongside a Malvern Hills Independent, who topped the polls. Turnout rose 7.5% in this by-election compared to the 2023 all-ups, with Reform coming out on top, from a standing start. The Conservatives slipped to a distant second place, whilst us and the Greens ...
[IMG: Chocolate cake on a ceramic plate] No candles but plenty of chocolate. Photo by Eftychia Syrimi on Pexels.com. On this day in 2022, the first edition of The Week in Polls appeared. My weekly guide to what you need to know about political polling was first a series of pilot blog posts, next an email newsletter on Revue and now, after Elon Musk shut down Revue, a weekly missive via Substack. Looking back to that first edition, it is sadly not a surprise that it highlighted poor media coverage of political polling. But I hope that readers of the ...
The Guardian reports that a Green Party local election candidate has been arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred for allegedly posting anti-Semitic content on social media. The paper says that the Metropolitan Police arrested two women under the Public Order Act, one confirmed as one of the party's candidates, on Thursday morning: The posts, seen by The Telegraph, are alleged to have included comments from one of the women such as: "ramming a synagogue isn't anti-Semitism, it's revenge." A now-deleted post from one of the women also claimed the government was overrepresented with "Zionist Jews", and another allegedly ...
