General Election Rundown Webinar: The Results

Join Lexington’s Mike Craven, Executive Chair and Stephanie Lloyd, Director for an in-depth election results analysis session in the week after polling day.?

In this session, Mike and Stephanie will explore the composition of the new parliament and government, what this means for your business, what is likely to be the focus in the next 100 days, and how you can best engage with a new political reality in Westminster.?

Prior to founding Lexington, Mike was a political adviser and chief media spokesperson for the last Labour Government. Before working in agency, Stephanie was an adviser to senior Labour politicians and ran Progress, a think tank for centre-left Labour members.?

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The Margin of Error…?

By Simon Burton, Senior Counsel and former Downing Street adviser, and??

Paul Harrison, Executive Director and former Downing Street Press Secretary??

There are no certainties in politics. And in life, we’re told, the only certainties are death and taxes; somehow this election has even managed to remove the certainty around the latter.?

For a long time, the size of the mountain Keir Starmer had to climb (and the relatively short time he had to do it) meant that a minority Labour government or a new coalition administration were two plausible outcomes. That is surely no longer the case. Keir Starmer, taking over in the wake of the worst result Labour had seen since 1935, is set to sweep into Downing Street at the head of a very healthy majority just five years later. That would make history, so we’ll look at two things - what the polling is telling us, and some of the implications politically.?

The polling?

Every election seems to feature more polling than the last - there have already been well over 100 since the PM announced. GE2024 seems to have become very much the MRP polling election. But what actually is an MRP, and how do the pollsters reach their conclusions? MRP stands for Multi-level Regression and Post-stratification. It is a relatively new technique which provides a constituency breakdown that allows the media to speculate (inevitably) about which big names are about to lose their seats.??

Traditional polling methods cannot provide this level of detail; their focus is to estimate national vote share and assume it'll be replicated locally. MRP polls take longer to conduct, but we've seen several, and they all point to a big win for Sir Keir Starmer.?

Let’s borrow a bit from the clever people at Electoral Calculus to describe the process. An MRP poll works out the relationship between peoples' voting intention and their individual demographic characteristics like age, income, and educational background, including past voting behaviour. That allows pollsters to count how many of these different types of voters there are in each constituency, and thus to make a prediction of what will happen in each seat.?

The models used by different polling companies differ as they have slightly different inputs – how they redistribute don’t knows, for example. Sample sizes and fieldwork dates vary a lot and there are limitations we should be aware of. Each MRP poll has around 100 seats in the margin of error – which understandably is less widely reported than the headline figures, but would significantly alter the overall composition of the Commons. These polls are also largely unable to pick up factors unique to a particular seat, for instance the reputation of the sitting MP or the possibility of a local A&E closing. But even so, the only question really still in play is how large the Labour majority will be.??

The implications?

If the polls are correct, they have clear implications for Parliament.?

First, the Government would have no trouble getting their legislation through the Commons – all these new MPs will likely be compliant for at least the first few years as they learn the rules of engagement. A large majority can withstand all but the very largest of rebellions.?

Second, Labour will dominate the Select Committee system in terms of both chairs and members, so they will be very much marking their own homework, which reduces the amount of uncomfortable scrutiny on the administration overall.?

Third, the House of Lords will become more important as a place of challenge. No party has a majority there - Labour will surely appoint some new peers but that won’t significantly change the landscape. In the short term, there's a persuasive argument that the Lords may be the only place able to conduct effective scrutiny of legislation and of government decisions.?

Finally, in some ways the majority is undefined. The way the Labour campaign has been run (as described elsewhere) means in effect that Keir Starmer will have a huge personal mandate, but a narrow policy one. We know that the picture on tax as presented is highly likely to change - absent big shifts in trend growth, and that's a very live picture that business will have to engage with.?