It has been a constant that the Labour Party polls better than Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak polls better than the Conservative Party. At minus 41, Rishi’s approval rating is now scoring lower than Boris (-40) when he was ousted as Prime Minister. Just saying…

Ben Wallace still rules the roost in the latest survey from Conservative Home again, with his net satisfaction still over twenty points clear of Kemi Badenoch in second place. Wallace has been top of the pile for nearly a year and a half now…

The rest of the table looks similar to last month too: Kemi Badenoch is second on +60.4, with James Cleverly third again on +55.1. Cleverly’s rating has dropped by 8 points, although that still wasn’t enough to shift his position. As Paul Goodman points out, his “pragmatic” approach to China clearly hasn’t done much damage in the eyes of the Tory membership after all…

Rishi will be pleased to see he’s held firm with +47.4, a 3.7 point increase on last month. Given he’s soared by over 20 places in the last couple of months, even another modest gain will be welcomed. Suella Braverman has dropped from fourth to seventh with only a minor dip in her rating, with Penny Mordaunt and Steve Barclay climbing a couple of places to knock her down a peg. Obviously, the membership didn’t have much truck with those harrowing bullying allegations against “macho” Barclay…

In a Civil Service survey carried out over six weeks in September and October, staff were asked whether they would describe themselves as experiencing “long Covid” – battling mysterious symptoms more than four weeks after first getting the virus. According to data published last week 10.8% answered “yes”. This compares to ONS data finding 3.3% of people living in UK households said they were experiencing self-reported “long Covid” symptoms. So, for some reason civil servants are more than three times as likely to suffer “long Covid” as the rest of us.

Guido can clear up this medical mystery. It is because so many of the people who go into the civil service are looking for a cushy life, not to work hard, because they are work-shy lazy good-for-nothings. Fact.

On a similar note the Daily Sceptic reports that a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at “post–COVID-19 condition (PCC) in young people after mild acute infection” to find how common it was and to find risk factors. PCC is more colloquially known as “long Covid”. The researchers discovered: “PCC was not associated with biological markers specific to viral infection.” That is, millennials in the study were equally likely to claim to suffer from ‘long Covid’, whether or not they had suffered from acute COVID-19. The researchers concluded that ‘long Covid’ is predicted by “initial symptom severity” and, intriguingly, “psychosocial factors”. Guido reckons the “psychosocial factors” are that they too are work-shy lazy good-for-nothings.

No doubt Guido will get some tragic email about exceptional cases. Nevertheless, the miracle cure for ‘long Covid’ appears to be self-employment…

The Pink ‘Un’s John Burn-Murdoch’s statistical number crunching during the pandemic was compulsive and compelling reading. Today he has shifted from analysing Covid figures to quantifying political policies. He has concluded that the Conservative Party has “become unmoored from the British people” and their own voters ideologically. His article goes on to claim that “the government may have adopted the most extreme economic position of any major party in the developed world”. He further claims “the Tories are the most economically right-wing major party in the developed world”!

The government has announced an energy price cap, which it says will cost £60 billion for the first six months and the industry reportedly expects the total bill to be between £130 billion and £150 billion. That is an intervention in the markets on a scale that former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell once dreamt of, and for which he was condemned as Marxist. Guido is at a loss to understand how that is right-wing or free market. It is the exact opposite. How can a party doing that be the most economically right-wing party in the developed world?

It turns out that FT asked a bunch of academics their opinion. Political “scientists” in universities are not famously politically representative, they’re far to the left of the public even if they are supposedly from “across the political spectrum”. The leftie-lecturer stereotype is well founded. This seems more like a qualitative academic focus group.

The claims from the FT’s comparative analysis of data from the British Election Study are even more bizarre. The usual four-quartered political compass (left/right on economics, up/down social libertarian/authoritarian) chart is supposedly applied to the British electorate. According to the FT there are no right-of-centre, social libertarians in Britain. Not one, with that whole quarter of the chart empty. This will be news to those of us who support keeping the government out of the economy and our bedrooms. The many millions of people who vote Conservative for lower taxes and also want to legalise soft drugs don’t seem to exist either, as far as the FT is concerned…

UPDATE:  Guido asked John Burn-Murdoch on Twitter “Do you really believe there are no voters in the bottom right quadrant? My friends feel unseen.” He replied “Not none, but exceptionally few. Less than 4% of people who voted in 2019 are in that quadrant. The chart simplifies the distributions in order to make it readable, but 4% is barely distinguishable from zero.” 4% is very distinguishable from zero. 4% of the electorate would be over a million voters.

The Times is reporting that Starmer is taking soundings and considering announcing that he would resign if he is found to have broken lockdown rules:

“He is being urged by close colleagues to wrest back the political initiative by stating that he believes receiving a fine for breaking coronavirus restrictions is a resigning offence for party leaders. … Starmer is understood to have accepted that he needs a fresh political position to reflect the new reality of the Durham investigation, which is expected to take six to eight weeks. This morning he is taking soundings from supportive members of the shadow cabinet, senior staff members and allies about what that position should be. Announcing that he would resign if fined is one option under consideration.”

Is he too chicken? What would co-conspirators advise him to do?

What should Starmer do next?

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) May 9, 2022

Piers Morgan has wrapped up his first week at TalkTV, and on cue, Guido is here to report the BARB viewing figures. There’s good news and bad news. The good news for Piers is he has managed to slow the trend of losing over 100,000 viewers with every consecutive show. The bad news is last night’s broadcast was still the lowest-rated yet, pulling in 117,900 viewers in his primetime slot – compared to 316,800 on Monday… 

Piers keeps boasting how well the show is doing on social media, which is hard for us to measure without access to his logins. We can however see that the show’s Twitter account has, at the time of going to pixel, just 42,056 followers and is getting signal digit retweets. Early days yet… 

Piers will be pleased that despite the decline he is still leading against rivals in his time-slot. Tom Newton Dunn’s The News Desk now has a dedicated fan club of 14,300 viewers. Which means 39,900 people have, since Monday, decided to watch something else instead. Celebrations are in order for the team over at The Talk with Sharon Osbourne, though: viewership leapt up to 37,900 last night, after pulling in just 9,700 on Wednesday. The show beat Beth Rigby Interviews with a mere 28,600 viewers, though it trailed behind GB News’ Dan Wootton on 53,200. All well and good – except Sharon wasn’t even on the show last night… will she even return?