Phil Rodgers: Just how predictable is the 2024 General Election? Plus my verdict on Cambridge hustings performances

Our political correspondent, Phil Rodgers, considers what might happen in Cambridgeshire and further afield.

General Elections do not always turn out how people expect.

Take the 2015 election, for example. A few weeks before polling day that year, I attended a political panel discussion at Churchill College. At the time, a hung Parliament was widely expected, and all but one of the eminent panellists agreed that this was indeed the most likely result. The exception was Charles Clarke, former Labour Home Secretary, who gloomily predicted that everyone else was wrong and the Conservatives were going to win outright.

When polling day came, Mr Clarke was proved right, as Labour lost ground, the Lib Dems imploded, and the Conservatives won a 10-seat majority.

2017 provided a similarly unexpected outcome, as Theresa May surprised the nation with a snap election. At the start of the campaign the Conservatives were around 20 points ahead in the polls, so the nation was even more surprised as the blue team’s lead dwindled away and they managed to lose their majority entirely.

Conventional wisdom did somewhat better in the swirling turmoil of 2019’s Brexit-dominated General Election. A Conservative victory was widely expected, but they still managed about twice the majority predicted by the final polls.

What, then, will 2024 bring? With the British General Election on the fourth of July, and the American Presidential Election on the fifth of November, it seems only reasonable to expect political fireworks. Some British commentators have even been going around muttering “Canada 93” - a reference to the 1993 Canadian federal election, in which the Conservatives managed to lose 154 of the 156 seats that they were defending. Surely the towering poll leads will be enough to guarantee triumph for Labour and disaster for the Conservatives? Well, maybe.

Earlier this year I had another chance to hear Charles Clarke speak, at an event at Anglia Ruskin University. Given his predictive accuracy in 2015 I was particularly interested to hear what he thought would happen this time. His message, essentially, was that a Labour victory was far from being the nailed-on certainty that was widely assumed. So while I do think that Keir Starmer is more likely than not to end up at Number 10, I would be very cautious about some of the wilder projections of seat numbers that we’ve seen.

What about here in Cambridge? The city experienced some closely-fought General Election campaigns in the 2010s, with literally hundreds of Labour and Lib Dem activists tramping the streets as their respective candidates Daniel Zeichner and Julian Huppert battled for electoral supremacy.

This time the campaign in Cambridge isn’t quite so intense. The reason, of course, is that it’s not very hard to foresee the result. I think Daniel is going to win. Virtually everyone thinks Daniel is going to win. Even Charles Clarke would probably be prepared to admit, grudgingly, that Daniel is going to win. Consequently, party activists are focusing more of their attention on the “battleground” seats where the outcome is less certain - Labour are sending local volunteers to Peterborough, where they hope to overturn a narrow Conservative majority, and the Lib Dems are focusing on South Cambridgeshire, one of their best prospects for a gain.

Even in a fairly safe seat, though, it’s good to get a chance to hear the candidates speak, so I was glad to have an opportunity to do so last week at the Climate and Environmental Hustings, organised by Cambridge Friends of the Earth. Recent security concerns were addressed by bag searches on the way in, as well as the presence of a gentleman who checked under the desks before the candidates sat down, and then spent the rest of the evening carefully watching the audience.

Among the candidates, the best visual aids of the evening were provided by Khalid Abu-Tayyem, representing George Galloway’s Workers Party. He’d come equipped with glossy photographs of potholes, a map showing sea level rise bringing the coastline towards Cambridge, and other illustrations of environmental issues. He got a fairly sympathetic hearing from the audience.

Independent candidate David Carmona was cheerfully straightforward in his answers to audience questions, simply saying what he thought without being at all bothered about whether it was what the environmentally-conscious audience wanted to hear. He rather reminded me of a previous Independent candidate in Cambridge, Miles Hurley, who said at another hustings, “Some people jump out of aeroplanes for fun. I’m doing this.”

For the Conservatives, I thought Shane Manning acquitted himself pretty well, considering that this is his first Parliamentary election campaign and he’d effectively arrived in the constituency by parachute around 10 minutes earlier. He was articulate, well-briefed on local issues, and got his message across clearly, even though the audience didn’t like very much of it.

For Green candidate Sarah Nicmanis, this was very much a home fixture and she had a lot of support from the crowd. She stopped to consult her notes occasionally, but her passion and commitment to environmental causes, particularly on the climate crisis, came across very clearly.

Lib Dem candidate Cheney Payne was fluent, passionate and her council experience clearly gave her a strong grasp of the detail of local issues. There were occasional glimpses of what must be a steely classroom manner in her day job as a secondary school assistant principal. Her support for the planned move of the Cambridge sewage works met with some strong opposition from some audience members, but she found a good measure of support on other issues.

Daniel Zeichner spoke with the calm assurance of someone who is 33-1 odds on favourite to be re-elected and has done more hustings than you’ve had hot dinners. His keen desire to make progress on environmental issues as part of a Labour government came across clearly, even if it was sometimes a rather cautious, measured, and pragmatic kind of progress. He also supported the sewage works move, again to some audience opposition.

The one Cambridge candidate who wasn’t at the hustings was Keith Garrett of Rebooting Democracy, who is contesting the constituency for the fourth time. However, his answer to pretty much any policy question is the same - that it should be decided by abolishing elected politicians and instead using deliberation amongst randomly selected groups of citizens.

The large turnout for the event showed that there are plenty of local voters who are keen to engage with candidates on the issues, and thanks should certainly go to everyone involved in the very complex organisation of the hustings.

While it may not be difficult to guess the election result in Cambridge, other seats in the county are a good deal less predictable.

Even though there are already a lot of bar charts floating around at election time, I can’t resist adding one more.

The graph is based on the betting odds for each of the Cambridgeshire seats, and shows the chance of each candidate winning implied by those odds.

As you can see, Cambridge looks very safe for Labour, and the betting markets also think the red team have a strong chance of a gain in Peterborough. Things are looking pretty good for the Lib Dems in South Cambridgeshire, and they are also in contention in Ely & East Cambridgeshire and in St Neots & Mid Cambridgeshire.

Meanwhile, Huntingdon and North West Cambridgeshire both look like Conservative-Labour contests, and only Steve Barclay’s seat of North East Cambs looks relatively safe for the Conservatives.

If these odds are to be believed, we are well beyond the territory of Labour’s 1997 landslide, when five of the (then) seven Cambridgeshire seats stayed blue. However, as with some of the opinion polls, I would take these odds with a large pinch of salt. They do not account for the impact of Independent candidates, and the betting markets are certainly not omniscient - shortly before Daniel Zeichner was first elected, betting odds were cheerfully predicting a 75 per cent chance that his Lib Dem opponent Julian Huppert would retain the seat.

At the time of publication, there are just under a couple of weeks of the election campaign remaining - double the proverbial long time in politics. When Big Ben’s bongs finally mark the end of voting at 10pm on 4 July, the very next thing that will happen is the release of the exit poll. Recent history tells us that, even when the exit poll is very surprising, it is likely to be right - or at least, more right than what most people are expecting. We’ll just have to wait and see exactly how surprising it is this time.