The dangers of foresight and hindsight meet in election predictions

Is it really a good idea to claim there's no way we'll have another coalition come May?

Mystic Meg (Rex)

With the pistol fired for the marathon of election punditry to come, this column begins with a binding pledge. There will be no predictions here, other than this. In the battle between the science of opinion polling and the religious faith that stems from a feeling in the bones, someone will take the tragic role of Peggy Noonan.

During the 2012 US presidential election, when the ostriches of the Republican right refused to believe the polls, the Wall Street Journal commentator and one-time Reagan speechwriter succumbed to blind faith.

On the evidence of noisy rally crowds and Romney placards in front yards, she foresaw an “undertow” election in which the currents sweeping Mittens to the White House were invisible. In the event, the pollster Nate Silver proved more reliable, and Noonan’s reputation was incinerated on a bonfire of vanity.

The first of our pundits to stake a claim to Noonanistic self-indulgence is the Sunday Telegraph’s Janet Daley, whose strident certainty about matters of immense complexity establishes her as a marginally more polished Melanie Phillips. While the pollsters line up to admit that they have little clue who will form the next government, or how, Janet offers a piece headlined “There’s no way we’re heading for another carping coalition.”

Although what leads her to that conclusion is unclear from the text, wishful thinking starts as the favourite. Janet believes the Coalition has produced “more recrimination and personal bitterness rather than less”.

It’s a perceptive thought. John Major’s government was so free of civil warfare over Europe that he never had to stand for relection as leader. Nothing defined the Blair years like the absence of internecine skirmishing. And Gordon Brown’s three years were serenely bereft of a single attempted coup.

In Janetworld, where majority governments are havens of peace and tranquillity, “virtually every commentator and politician I talk to is privately saying the same thing” [that there will be a clear victory]. Although Janet declines to name the winner, we may assume that the mouth grinning up at her from the crystal ball isn’t struggling with a bacon sandwich.

There is a chance that Janet will be right, of course. It’s certainly worth recalling her line “Obama will not win the presidency” from 2008.

Failing that, we look forward to the column explaining why she was right all along, and it was the idiot electorate who got it so horribly wrong.

Soothsaying triumphs where consistency fails

If anyone can genuinely divine the electoral future, it must be The Sun’s big money signing.

I refer not to Kelvin MacKenzie, who is rejoining the paper as a columnist in a blatant ruse to boost circulation on Merseyside. I am thinking of Frank Pilkington, whose arrival as the paper’s “brilliant new astrologer” was marked with an interview.

Frank’s credentials can no more be doubted than the fearsome consistency of his thinking. The stargazer who “helped beauty queen Jamey Bowers to lift the Miss Scotland crown after advising her to wear gold for the competition final” is a fierce foe of the astrologically fanciful.

“I can’t stand all that stuff,” thunders Frank. “All this ‘You should wear a pink ribbon’ … nonsense.” Brilliant indeed.

Who can decipher Sybil of New York’s utterances?

If one pundit deserves equal respect to Janet Daley, it is Louise Mensch. Since leaving us in the UK for New York, Louise has used the perspective lent by distance to establish herself as a sublimely gifted political analyst.

Yesterday’s Sun on Sunday offering was a soothsaying masterclass as she too predicted a Tory win. At least I think she did, though without running it through the boys and girls at Bletchley Park, it’s hard to be sure.

“No winners in weirdest election ever” was the headline, and the piece concluded “no one party will get its way”. Yet somewhere in the middle she wrote, “Cameron looks like getting another turn in No 10, with a reduced overall majority”.

I will not insult your intelligence by dwelling on any confusion inherent there. I will remind you that Louise was once a heavy Class A user, and is on record saying that her mind never fully recovered. Still, we’re all for affirmative action within the Murdoch empire – and bless her heart, she does her best.

May fails to ennoble convicted cricketer

Sympathies to Theresa May on the death of a dream. The Mail on Sunday reports that her efforts to wangle a knighthood for Geoffrey Boycott were stymied due to Boycott’s 1996 conviction in France, upheld on appeal, for beating a girlfriend after a night’s drinking with Billy Joel. Boycott has always denied the offence. As Home Secretary, Mrs May understands the need to take the word of a convicted criminal over the verdicts of two French courts, and her championing of a knighthood in no way undermines her campaign against the trivialising of domestic violence.