The reckoning
Auditing political predictions I made in the last year
And so this is Christmas, and how have I done? I write a reasonable number of pieces over the course of a year and I make testable predictions. I’ll be putting together some predictions for the next year or so in a coming piece, so before reading that you probably want to see how accurate I’ve been recently. So, time to mark my homework.
Things I got right
1. Boris Johnson would be replaced.
This time last year in You Are The Quarry I wrote “Boris Johnson looks doomed.” At the time, that was very much a minority view.
2. I got the general timeframe about right.
In the same piece I wrote “He may struggle on for a fair while, perhaps till June or so, to be used as a scapegoat for a series of difficult decisions on which his successor can have clean hands. But right now, he looks done.”
3. I correctly identified contenders to replace him.
In Next (written before Partygate broke), I wrote: “You might simply back all of my magnificent seven [Sunak, Truss, Hunt, Javid, Gove, Patel, Raab] to weighted stakes at current Betfair prices (effectively getting a bet at roughly 8/11 with the prices at the time of writing that one of them will win) and consider you had a value bet.” This bet, obviously, would have won.
I went further: “You might back just those three [Sunak, Truss, Hunt]. You can do so for weighted stakes on Betfair, effectively getting a bet at better than 5/4. Right now, you’d have to think it’s odds-on that the winner will come from that trio.” This bet also would have won, and indeed I’d named both of the last two in this.
I went still further: “Of those three, Rishi Sunak might be favourite but his price of 4.1 (just over 3/1 in traditional form) still looks good: his relationship with his party as Chancellor is closer to Gordon Brown’s than to Philip Hammond’s or even George Osborne’s. We might well look back in a few years’ time and feel that his ascent to the top role was inevitable.” This bet would have lost. I leave it to others to decide whether I can claim any kind of moral victory given he is now the Prime Minister.
4. In The Caucus Race, I correctly spotted that “there will be a new leader with inadequate support from the Parliamentary party, no mandate from the general electorate, difficult decisions ahead and a predecessor with a grievance stalking them with mass media coverage tailored to his agenda”. On that basis I correctly deduced that “Right now for the Conservatives, it looks like things are probably going to get worse.”
That state of affairs continues. And things still look as if they are probably going to get worse for the Conservatives.
5. In Lost in space: Liz Truss, the weightless Prime Minister, I correctly concluded that “Her tenure as Prime Minister looks pretty certain to be nasty and brutish”.
And how.
6. In Interlude, I was, I believe, the first person to state publicly that the Kwasi-budget had doomed Liz Truss.
7. On Brexit, at the end of last year in The Seven Year Itch I correctly expected “to see a continuing glissando in support levels for Brexit”. I noted that “Sooner or later, Brexit needs to start looking like it is working well enough if it is not going to become part of the national mythology as a great error.” That point of it becoming part of the national mythology as a great error may now have been reached.
8. In the same piece, I advised Labour “to show that they understand the language of priorities and that reversing Brexit is down the list.” I’m sure they didn’t see my advice but that approach is being followed by Labour. I continue to believe it to be the correct one for them.
That’s not too shabby really. But now we need to look at the debit side.
Things I got wrong
1. How supine Conservative MPs were about replacing Boris Johnson.
It seemed obvious to me very early that Partygate was irretrievable for Boris Johnson. Conservative MPs took much longer to reach this conclusion. I underestimated how many of them were willing to wait and see whether the public would give him another chance.
Even later on, I overestimated Conservative MPs’ willingness to act (though I did note “Boris Johnson’s best chance may be if the vote does indeed come early.” — he won what at the time of writing was an early vote, only then to self-sabotage in his response to Chris Pincher’s disgrace).
On this I think Conservative MPs made a major mistake. Just imagine if Rishi Sunak had replaced Boris Johnson in January or February. The Conservative party would look in much better shape now than it actually does. They should have acted far more swiftly.
2. How unserious so many Conservative MPs and members were.
Rishi Sunak literally told them why Liz Truss’s approach wasn’t credible. For that matter, so did Michael Gove. Yet when faced with a choice between traditional Thatcherism (remember, Geoffrey Howe raised taxes in 1981 in the depths of a recession) and a childlike attachment to tax cuts come rain or shine, the membership and far too many MPs opted for the childlike attachment.
This unseriousness manifested itself in three ways I didn’t expect at the start of the year. First, the Conservative party chose Liz Truss to replace Boris Johnson. Secondly, a large part of the Conservative party remains implacably opposed to Rishi Sunak, who seems to be regarded in some quarters as a crypto-socialist. Thirdly, a large (and heavily overlapping) part of the Conservative party still hankers for the return of Boris Johnson.
3. Just how spectacularly useless Liz Truss was.
I always thought that she was a high risk gamble for the Conservatives. I hadn’t expected that she would make so many stupid mistakes in such a short period of time. Every time I thought I’d adjusted for her uselessness, she limboed under my lowered expectations with a still more crass mistake. As a result, instead of failing slowly, she failed very quickly indeed.
Self-appraisal
Not too bad, all things considered. It was a wild year for politics and by and large I rode the bucking bronco reasonably well. I’m sure others out there did better but for me it was one of my better years for reading the runes.