General Election Week 5 – The ‘cut throughs’

So what cut through to ‘Whitby Woman’ this week in the election media coverage?

We’ve had an endless slew of big polls predicting various huge Tory losses. Inflation dropped to 2%, but did anyone notice? One pollster, Ipsos, predicted a huge Farage win in Clacton. And all over this last weekend we had the mainstream media gorging on either (a) Farage’s latest exposing gaffe when he said Putin was given the excuse to invade Ukraine because of NATO’s eastwards expansion or (b) Farage merely restating some mainstream geopolitical analysts’ viewpoint, take your pick! And then there is of course the ‘gate’ that seemingly hasn’t yet been allocated ‘gate’ status for some reason: ‘election betting-gate’, perhaps?

So it’s mostly been Farage, Farage, Farage really, as the mainstream media cannot help themselves but shout about their favourite political hate figure. There is of course an interesting point here, as one Telegraph journalist put it recently:

“Farage is by far and away the best orator and debater around and says, sometimes, what huge numbers of us think. In a politically stagnant age, of the crushingly dull Starmer and the ‘rabbit in the headlights’ Sunak, Farage adds much colour to the hustings and would certainly do so to the House of Commons.” 

Anyway, the runner up for that news item that Whitby Woman will probably still remember by polling day is the endless poll misery for the Tories. But therein lies a question: are the pollsters actually affecting voter behaviour rather than just reporting it? Does the endless drip drip of bad poll news for the Tories actually help depress their vote? Or will voters, as indeed with Cameron’s win in 2015 and the Brexit vote in 2016, deliver a rather better result for the Tories than the doomster pollsters have been predicting?

The outright winner is of course ‘election betting-gate’. Do you know anyone who bothers to bet on such things? No, nor do we. As the Matt cartoon in The Telegraph recently put it: “I’m your Tory candidate. I bet you a tenner you’re not going to vote for me!”