A Conversation With Rob Ford

We discussed the state of Substack, the general election and polling

We’re heading into a long weekend in the UK. It’s May and the weather is (once again) rubbish. Rain on rain, with a tantalising bit of sunshine in-between. It’s going to put a dampener on the nation’s beer gardens and those eager beavers planning to run half-marathons or 5ks in the coming days.

But at least we have the local elections to entertain us. Bizarrely, London doesn’t start counting its vote until tomorrow — we went to the polls yesterday. As Total Politics CEO Mark Wallace has pointed out, this practice doesn’t exactly fill voters with trust.

Anyway, on the matter of politics, the media and polling, I recently caught up with fellow Substacker Rob Ford. For those who aren’t familiar with Rob’s work, he’s a pressor of political science at The University of Manchester who regularly appears in the media.

He’s also part of the BBC’s exit poll team and has published several books on British politics, including Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box: 50 things you need to know about British elections.

I spoke to Rob for The Political Press Box about the state of this platform, how the media deals with polling and his thoughts on the UK’s next general election.

Nobody really knows when Rishi Sunak is going to call it, but Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham is reporting that Tory rebels are giving up on their plot to unseat him before the next national poll.

With the economy heading in the right direction (CPI inflation is down to 3.2%) and the infamous Rwanda deportation plan now off-the-ground, the expectation is that the Prime Minister could try and take Labour into the long grass and hold an election in the winter. Such a move would certainly impact voter turnout and the parties’ ground games.

Speaking of the economy and immigration, I’ve explained in the most recent newsletter why some of statistics behind them should be treated with deep caution.

Elsewhere, this story from CNBC caught my eye. It sounds like AI engineers are being pushed to their limit. In a forthcoming interview, Chris Stokel-Walker and I get into why generative AI is a massive resources race, with all the second and third-order impacts that brings.

I hope you have a good weekend when you get to it. You might even have better weather than rainy old England.