Two years ago today Liz Truss became Prime Minister. That went well.
With the country in a state of political flux I took the opportunity to ask who you thought would win the next General Election. I offered four options and asked you to "pick the outcome you expect, not the outcome you want". 83 of you had a go.
I'm not sure if you'd count that as a success or not.
Only 16 people, that's 20%, correctly predicted a Labour majority.
Given that the eventual majority was 174, not a narrow squeak, that seems quite a miss.
At least 70% of you predicted a Labour Prime Minister, so the correct direction of travel was forecast.
But equally 60% of you predicted a hung parliament which absolutely didn't happen.
It's interesting to look at some of the comments some of you left with your predictions.
LABOUR Majority
• But only by a hair's breadth.
• Landslide time
• SNP collapse, Labour boost, mark my words!
• A big swing needed for this but Truss's (lack of) popularity and the effect of the increased cost of living on people may be enough for it to happen.
No Majority Labour PM
• Labour supported by lib-dems in coalition or confidence/supply.
• Labour *should* get an easy majority, which is why they’ll somehow find a way not to. They’ve never quite grasped the idea that political parties mainly exist to win elections.
• Labour's total loss of Scotland makes a UK majority just about impossible.
• It should be a walk in for Labour. But with Starmer's Labour so weak, timid and uninspiring, I'm guessing few people will feel motivated to get out to vote for them.
No Majority Tory PM
• Think they will just about survive, sadly, despite the last however many years and all the scandals and incompetence.
• Dear God no. But with our broken electoral system I can't see any other outcome.
• Can see Starmer imploding, Lib Dems or someone being second largest party.
• Can see the Tories doing enough to lose the next election, but am not convinced Labour will do anything that lets them win it unless the expected impending crisis is really on an extremely large scale.
TORY Majority
• Devastatingly inevitable, I feel.
• Labour do not look electable in their current form.
• Truss will play the populist card, which in turn will go down well with a lot of voters. I can't see anything other than this realistically happening.
• All my adult life the tories have snuck in against the interests of the country. I'd love it to be different, but have lost faith that's the kind of country we live in.
Some of those look really perceptive, others ridiculous, but only with the benefit of hindsight.
A heck of a lot happened between autumn 2022 and the election, indeed a heck of a lot happened in the three weeks after I asked you the question, so a lot of your initial assumptions proved ultimately incorrect.
To be fair I asked you again three months later, at Christmas 2022, and you were a lot better then.
This time 43% of you correctly predicted a Labour majority, a big boost since September, such was the impact of Liz Truss's calamitous premiership. But many of the associated comments were still insistent it'd be a small majority, and 50% of you still thought there'd be a hung parliament, so even this much better prediction wasn't entirely indicative of Sir Keir's thumping win.
And what all this shows is that we're generally very bad at making long-term predictions because timescales are hard to judge and events get in the way.
For example...
» At Christmas 2021 I asked who you thought would be Prime Minister in a year's time - only 16% of you picked Rishi Sunak.
» At the start of 2021, with lockdown about to be imposed for the third time, I asked when you thought households would be allowed to mix indoors again. Half of you picked 2022 or 2023, and 88% of you picked a later date than the eventual release in July 2021.
» Midway through 2020 I asked you to predict where we'd be at the end of the year regarding Covid, Brexit and Trump. 60% of you correctly guessed Biden would beat Trump, but only 30% of you foresaw Christmas lockdown restrictions and only 30% of you predicted Boris would get a Brexit deal.
It's all too easy to look back and think "how were we ever so stupid?", whereas in fact the future we ended up in wasn't in any way obvious at the time.
And I mention all this because it's still very much the case that the future isn't obvious, indeed it pretty much always isn't, and perhaps we should remember this when sticking our neck out and making predictions with undue certainty.
So today would be a good day to ask you to look into the future one more time.
Who do you think will be the next American President?(poll closed)
