John Curtice: UK politicians suffering “charisma bypass”

One mystery of the UK’s political week has been why Rishi Sunak clung like a cliff-walker to a Sky News forecast that after last week’s local elections the country was headed for a hung parliament. Another mystery is why Sky’s election analyst made the forecast in the first place. He seems to have ignored the likelihood of big Labour gains in Scotland, and the decreasing utility of local results as a guide to national ones. Most people, including the psephologist John Curtice, reckon Sunak and the Conservatives are heading for a thumping defeat. That said, there’s a big difference between the last time this happened and now. There’s no Blair; only Sunak, Labour’s Keir Starmer and the LibDems’ Ed Davey. As Curtice said at this week’s live recording of Tortoise’s Trendy podcast: “We’ve got this incredible set of politicians who in my view are not very good at politics because they’re not very good at articulating vision... And certainly all of them had a charisma bypass operation.”