The City and the Commuters

Seat Previews for central London, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire

Back to the seat previews today - 36 in total. We finish off London by taking a tour around the central seats, including those belonging to Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer and Greg Hands. Will it be the first inner London wipeout for the Tories since the mid-1870s?

Then we head into the Anglia region and the commuter belt that sits above London with Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, a traditionally very Tory area that has been shifting away from them demographically at some speed. Oliver Dowden and Grant Shapps’ seats are both in Herts.

You may have noticed there have been a lot of MRPs out over the last few days, and there’ll be another from Focaldata on Monday. Dylan will do some aggregate results from them all next week but, while they’re showing a fairly wide range of possible results, the broad picture is consistent with everything else we’re seeing. The only real question is exactly how bad it gets for them, with a 1997-style result now representing the upper end of the spectrum.

I’m also conscious I’ve not written about the Labour manifesto (it’s not all that exciting). But you can listen to the Power Test podcast we did on it with Nick Pearce, who wrote Labour’s 2010 manifesto and Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former head of policy. You can also read this feature I did for Prospect magazine on the challenge facing Labour, which nothing in the manifesto has changed.