Well there was an article the other day that pointed out he was once hit by a VW Beetle, only has one ball, and married a German. Maybe he should be famous for being a tribute act…

Ridiculous. Nigel Farage is part of a great entertainment machine. He is not someone who can govern this country. Reform is a giant ego trip, not a serious programme of alternative change. Nigel Farage provides amusement and diversion. What he does not provide is authority and good governance. In this country, whoever we vote for in the end, the British people choose authoritative, sensible managers, whether from the left or the right. What they don’t do, is go in for the performative politics that Nigel has made such a successful financial career out of.

~Michael Gove, Times Radio on Monday 17th June, who previously helped Boris Johnson to become prime minister and then served in his cabiet.

I agree. They’re good tools as a starting point, but more research needed. The closeness of many results (like getting Labour, Lib Dems, and Greens within a few percentage of each other) mostly just shows where on the political spectrum you are.

Yeah, I think some of the questions definitely come from the US version of the site (“should teachers be allowed to carry guns at school?” comes to mind), and aren’t really applicable to the UK.

90% Lib Dems and Greens for me (89% Labour) at one end, and 22% for Reform at the other. Digging deeper into the results, the areas I agree with Reform on include things that they agree with progressives on, like reforming political donations, and things where literally all the parties agree, like whether the government has done enough to deal with inflation.

Probably I Side With is your best option.

Also check your local media websites. Mine recently published a collection of personal statements from each of the candidates in my constituency, where all but one made their case for why people should vote for them. While it doesn’t dive deep into policies, it can give you an overall feel for what individual candidates are like. (Suffice to say, the independent candidate in my constituency who got kicked out of Reform for their social media posts, and sued a school for vaccinating children, is not going to get my vote.)

It is definitely worth checking all three of these to make sure your tactical vote is used in the best way possible:

• GetVoting.org

• StopTheTories.vote

• Electoral Calculus (Not a tactical voting site, but gives you more insight into your constituency, which can help you be sure the two above are giving the best advice.)

If you’re really not happy with the party the tactical voting sites recommend for your constituency, Compass are also offering the Win As One vote swapping tool, where you can be paired up with someone who also can’t vote the way they would like to. By swapping votes, both people can do what they have to for a tactical victory while still having their first choice counted.

You know, I’m a bit scared to get my hopes up for a Conservative wipeout. I’ll just end up disappointed on 5th July when they still have 100 seats or so.

Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. Deprived areas can definitely have lovely people in them - I live in a deprived area myself, and while there’s definitely some specific spots that I would avoid, most people tend to be… well, normal, decent people. But I can definitely see how somewhere that would vote for Lee Anderthal and then vote Reform would not have the same vibe as a deprived area currently eyeing up a Labour or Lib Dem candidate with genuine interest.

I know right? I suspect Keir Starmer would be much more popular if he was as weirdly hot as Keirbot.

Now there’s a sentence I never thought I would say/type.

So like…

Say you were watching a film, and a character gets hit by a Volkswagen Beetle, loses a testicle, and marries a German. Audiences and critics alike would be like “yeah, we get it, we know what you’re referencing” because the references would be deemed unnecessarily heavy-handed.

Why is it okay for reality to do that, but not film directors?

Starmer bots appear to be highly effective. I hear Labour are considering a rollout across the country.

Yeah, Ed Davey seems to have all the niceness and decentness of a guy who knows he could fight if he wanted to. And all his stunts lately, in which he appears to have come to no harm, say a lot about his physical fitness. I’d put money on him to squish Sunak in a heartbeat.

…leader of the opposition!

It is pretty exciting, isn’t it? I’m actually in Canada the week of the election, so in the event of a Conservative wipeout, I reckon the Canadian news coverage of that would be pretty epic, since it would repeat their 1993 election.

Assuming Penny decided against using the sword on Nutella.

I’m not sure they would even start with a bad plan. Starmer seems like the kind of person who would look at whether a plan is good or bad before even starting it.

I would anticipate a massive amount of both offshore and onshore wind farms - we know those work, and with onshore wind farms in particular, we know they’re pretty quick and cheap to get up and running (I recall reading a while back that it’s possible to get an onshore wind farm built and producing electricity in less than 12 months), and the main barrier to them has been all the old people being all NIMBY about it. Just having a blanket ban on “but it spoils my view!” as a valid objection to planning permission would do so much good.

Well I reckon Ed Davey could take Rishi Sunak, but if Sunak quits as leader and Suella Braverman takes over, I reckon she probably bites, so I’m not sure I’d like Davey’s chances in that fight. Now if it was making both parties fight, the Lib Dems would win that because the Tories wouldn’t have each other’s backs, so superior teamwork and a lack of compulsive backstabbing in the Lib Dems would give them the tactical advantage.

The Electoral Calculus prediction based on this poll:

Labour: 462

Tories: 68

Lib Dems: 68

Reform: 4 (Clacton, Ashfield (Lee Anderthal’s seat), Boston & Skegness, Wellingborough & Rushden (Peter Bone’s old seat))

Green: 2 (Brighton Pavilion, Bristol Central)

SNP: 21

Plaid: 4

Independents: 3 (Birmingham Ladywood, Islington North, Rochdale)

Which begs an important question: if the Tories and Lib Dems tie for the second largest party, who gets to be the opposition?

It won’t make a huge difference to how many seats Reform get (though with the way they’ve been polling, Electoral Calculus suggests they might get 4-5), but what it does is cuts into votes for the Conservatives, which ends up helping Labour and the Lib Dems. Most of the predictions I’ve put into Electoral Calculus based on the latest polls have had Reform taking enough votes from the Tories that the Lib Dems end up being the second largest party. That’s a pretty big change, despite FPTP!

The one thing that makes me optimistic that they wouldn’t persist in wasting money on things that won’t work is Starmer doesn’t strike me as a man that would do that. He’s just not that ideological. My sense of him as a person is that he’s someone that will look at a problem, listen to all the evidence, and then reach a conclusion upon which he bases his course of action. Any idea that can’t be proven to work will be jettisoned. I also strongly suspect that he hasn’t 100% decided what he’s going to do as prime minister, because he hasn’t got all the information yet.

So I’m reading the manifesto primarily as a statement of intent that outlines the general direction Labour would like to take the country, with specifics to be worked out later once Starmer has had a couple of weeks to stare at the problem in more detail.

There is no way this Labour government is going to be revolutionary, because that’s not who Starmer is. But a slow and steady, evidence-driven amble in the right direction seems likely.