In his final Golden Globe hosting gig, Gervais returned to form, shocking celebrities. His final line was a plea to left-wing actors not to use their acceptance speech to make a political statement. Not that the luvvies took much notice…

Turns out Gervais was pretty spot on when saying “Nobody cares about your views on politics or culture”. As YouGov reveals, only 9% of the public reckon celebrities should get involved in politics:

You’d think celebrities would stop embarrassing themselves given they’re constantly proving themselves to be on the losing side of every vote…

You can watch the hilarious speech in full here:

Ricky Gervais kicks off The #GoldenGlobes. pic.twitter.com/ZSdqiWMudx

— NBC Entertainment (@nbc) January 6, 2020

64% of the public think the BBC is somewhat or greatly biased.

This includes 35% of Leavers, who think it is greatly biased. Conversely, 30% of Remainers think there is little to no bias on the BBC.

The BBC likes to boast that is the most trusted media organisation. Unfortunately people, perhaps wisely, don’t trust the media in general…

London Labour’s lead over the Tories has dropped from 22 points to 10 points since the 2017 general election. Swinson has a +2 personal approval rating, Boris has a negative rating of -29 and Corbyn is through the floor on -45.

With Brexit the most important issue by far for Londoners, Professor Philip Cowley of QMUL reckons on these numbers Labour looks likely to lose seats.

“Compared to the position in 2017, these figures mean a fall of 16 points in the Labour share of the vote and just a four point drop in the Conservative share in practice, assuming no change by polling day, this would almost certainly mean seats being lost by Labour and gained by the Conservatives”.

Early days yet…

The Tories start the election campaign with a 16 point lead over Labour, who in-turn will find solace from being 9% clear of the Lib Dems. Still lots of undecideds in play for all parties…

However, with First Past the Post and the differences in voting behaviour from region to region, polling expert Sir John Curtice has issued a stark warning to the soaring Tories; predicting there will be over 100 seats won by parties other than the Conservatives and Labour.

If the Tories fail to win a majority, Labour will have a much more clear shot at finding coalition bedfellows. Strap in for weeks of psephological speculation…

Like almost every millennial, Mhairi Black was tweeting nonsense last night. Her target? The very standard Tory operation to gather data on sympathetic voters. Linking to a CCHQ-run website called ‘Get Brexit Done – Tell your MP to back an election‘, Black wrote:

“The Tories have launched a data mining website called get-brexit-done.com

Under the giant SEND button there’s then some tiny text explaining that by clicking the giant send button, you’re consenting to CCHQ emailing you everything they’re up to, which seems dubious at best.”

SNP MPs and MSP piled in on the shocking discovery, condemning the non-branded data mining and the emails it sent to remain MPs. The same MPs who, until 2018, were responsible for a website called www.ref.scot – a totally unbranded website bar a tiny sentence at the bottom saying it was promoted by the SNP.

The SNP also have six campaigns running on their own party’s website, which similarly collect your name, email address and postcode once you press SEND. The greatest hypocrisy, however, is the SNP criticising the Tories’ data strategy, when only one year ago they were found out to have been buying data on British voters from NationBuilder for seven years – a company accused by Facebook of violating its users’ privacy.

Amid the perennial spectacle of Carole Cadwalladr trying to milk the activities of a small over-hyped data company for all it’s worth, the tinfoil hat brigade have been remarkably unfussed about an organisation that has been amassing one of the largest databases of personal information in the UK for over 30 years. They claim to process a staggering 750 million data records from 600 sources about UK citizens each month, holding data on 51 million individuals in Britain. They’ve also regularly run data-driven marketing campaigns for the Labour Party for over a decade, culminating in a major data scandal last year. The credit rating agency Experian…

They even boast of being able to provide “actionable insight on every UK consumer, household and location” – exactly the sort of ‘micro-targeting’ that normally gets Carole’s antennae spinning like a washing machine. Top tip for “fearless investigative journalists”: micro-targeting by Obama or the Labour Party = good, microtargeting by Leavers or Tories = bad.

Experian claim that their data “segments UK consumers through financial behaviour, demographic classification, digital behaviour and buying habits”, giving their clients the opportunity to tailor marketing campaigns using 500+ variables. Clearly they’re happy for corporates and political parties to “meet your data self” too, for the right price…

When they’re not running their irritating “data self” ads, Experian have also done work for the Tories and the Better Together campaign in the 2014 Scottish referendum, while they still host Labour’s main ‘Contact Creator’ database. So the Brexit Party were surprised to find that when they approached Experian as well, they initially made good progress in their discussions before unexpectedly being told:

“Experian has taken the decision to not provide services to any organisation which is explicitly campaigning for or against Britain’s exit from the European Union. As a consequence we are not able to help you on this occasion.”

Presumably they’ll be immediately cancelling all of their lucrative contracts with the officially Remain-campaigning Labour Party too then…