The BBC’s 2015 “poll of polls”
Watching or reading most commentary of the general election, you could be forgiven for thinking that the political mainstream was suffering a moment of terrible confusion. By and large, however, the confusion of politics is the confusion of political commentary, and when pundits and hacks talk about the incomprehensibility of politics, they are really talking about their own inability to comprehend how politics is changing.
The world of Westminster journalism used to resemble the elite talking about the elite – irrelevant to most people’s lives by virtue of its privileged social perspective. This is of course still true: political journalists are overwhelmingly posh white men. But the dramatic twist of 2015 has been the transformation of the Westminster lobby from a privileged bubble into a circle of increasingly desperate soothsayers – irrelevant on its own terms, incapable of giving insight into who will win, why they will win, or even, beyond a set of geographical areas, what the key battlegrounds are.
