By-election fever? Blah.

So my theory that the Speaker was not necessarily toast lasted all of twelve hours. Somehow, in spite of the speculation that the SNP could be in with a real chance, I can't quite muster the same enthusiasm for another Scottish by-election that I could last year. The early indications are that the poll might take place in September - four months from now. The general election is (at most) now only eleven-and-a-half months away. Hardly seems worth the effort - and yet experience tells us that by-elections right on the eve of a general election are the most vital of the lot. Look no further than Govan 1973, Darlington 1983, or Greenwich 1987. Perhaps that's what's making me so queasy at the prospect - the outcome of a typically mad-as-a-bucket-of-frogs by-election campaign really could be a game changer for the outcome of the whole general election in Scotland.

Toast, and tripping over words

I'm not sure I entirely buy into the conventional wisdom of the hour that Michael Martin is definitely toast. Aster all, how many times did excitable journalists say the same about John Major in the mid-1990s, only to see him somehow limp on? The fact that nobody seems to have yet divined the way in which a sitting Speaker can be removed without the acquiescence of the government is quite a significant factor.

I may not be a Michael Martin fan, but one thing that has been deeply distasteful in the coverage of yesterday's extraordinary events is the focus on the Speaker's difficulty in reading out his prepared text. I don't know if the likes of Michael Crick and Tom Bradby simply hadn't noticed, but Martin has consistently struggled in that area since the day he took on the job in late 2000. If it hasn't been deemed worthy of comment on the television news any day in the last eight-and-a-half years, it seems somewhat gratuitous to suddenly drive the point home on the day he is fighting for his political life.

YouGov : SNP slip, but retain lead

For the third YouGov sub-sample in a row, the SNP have retained a lead over Labour (that includes one in which it was a joint lead with the Tories). Here are the full figures -

SNP 30% (-8)
Labour 28% (+1)
Conservatives 20% (+5)
Liberal Democrats 16% (+2)
Others 6% (-1)

While the SNP might be a touch disappointed not to be enjoying a somewhat larger lead in circumstances in which Labour are in near-total meltdown, this recent run of sub-samples nevertheless represents a substantial turnaround. In previous months YouGov had shown Labour in a fairly consistent lead in Scotland.

ComRes sub-sample : Labour slump to third

The Scottish sub-sample of the latest UK-wide ComRes poll shows the Conservatives up a few points, and the SNP down a few points while still retaining the lead. But the startling finding is that Labour has slumped to a dismal third place, and unlike the recent YouGov poll it's by some distance. Here are the full figures -

SNP 30% (-4)
Conservatives 26% (+6)
Labour 19% (-8)
Liberal Democrats 14% (+4)
Others 10% (+2)

Of course the likelihood is that Labour's third place can be explained away by the huge margin of error...but you do just wonder. That's how extraordinary these times are.

Eurovision reflections

I think at this time last year I managed a decent-length post on this topic, but I'm in one of those frames of mind where I think I'd struggle to string together a decent sentence, let alone seven proper paragraphs. Perhaps a numbered list of the main points will do to be getting on with!

1) Still don't quite get Norway, but it was obvious even to me it was going to win. The 'most points ever' thing I do find slightly odd.

2) I'm surprised and thrilled that Iceland finished second - when I predicted fourth place for them last night I actually worried that might be a touch on the high side. It genuinely is one of my all-time favourite Eurovision songs, so I'm glad Europe went for it (unlike some of my other favourites down the years!).

3) On second thoughts, maybe I wasn't so foolish in voting for Out of Control in the Greek national final!

4) The notion that Graham Norton and Andrew Lloyd-Webber were putting about that 'this is a music contest again'...well, any UK Eurovision fan will always be grateful for some positive spin at last, but it might be a touch premature in this case. The result tonight was actually remarkably similar to 2006 - a worthy runaway winner from western Europe masking the huge amount of political voting that was still going on. Romania and Moldova swapped votes, Andorra voted for Spain, Cyprus voted for Greece, Finland voted for Estonia (their neighbours and linguistic cousins), and it was pretty close to business as usual in the Balkans. I'm sure there were plenty of other examples I can't think of off the top of my head.

5) I wanted Paddy O'Connell to succeed Terry Wogan - but I was wrong. Graham Norton was excellent tonight, with exactly the right blend of cynicism, absurdity and positivity where it was warranted. It was only on the latter element that Terry Wogan has been found wanting in recent years.

6) The one area in which Norton was inferior to Wogan was in his failure to anticipate the most predictable political voting. Wogan would have predicted the destination of Andorra and Cyprus' douze points several seconds in advance - whereas Norton was seriously wondering if Andorra might be Patricia Kaas fans!

7) Norton also tried to maintain the tension for the last half-hour of voting on the question of whether the UK would stay in the top five, even though that was never in doubt. What was very close was the race for fourth place between Turkey and the UK, but he seemed totally oblivious to that!

8) As a UK supporter, I thought we had a genuine chance for all of about twenty seconds. When the first set of votes gave us ten points and Norway twelve it looked possible - but as soon as we got zero from the second set of votes I knew it was going to be a patchy night.

9) Why, oh why, oh why didn't I take Keith Mills seriously to task this year rather than last year over his anti-UK agenda? His initial prediction for It's My Time yesterday was 16th-20th, which he very generously hardened up to 16th in his final call. And what do you know? He's brazenly glossing over the fact that he got it so spectacularly wrong. Now there's a surprise.

10) Talking of Mr Mills, he does have this tendency to utterly convince himself that something very improbable is true and then flog the point to death in spite of a mass of contradictory evidence. A good example this year was his assumption that Lloyd-Webber was on the stage solely to impress the juries - from which he concluded it was likely to 'backfire' because the voting public would dislike it. But where is the slightest evidence that was ever the UK's thinking? For my money Lloyd-Webber was on stage to impress both the juries and the public with his celebrity - whether it worked or not I don't know, but I've little doubt that was always the idea.

11) Alsou was a good choice as host (pity she didn't get a chance to sing in place of the unfunny interludes), and I actually quite liked the intervention from space. Wasn't that done when the contest was in Latvia as well?

12) I actually made two slightly different predictions last night (one on Politicalbetting.com and one here), and I should have stuck with the first one because it was more accurate! I got last-minute cold feet about the UK's potential for a top five placing.

13) I'm surprised how poorly both Portugal and Malta did.

14) In the end I simply couldn't decide - so I voted for both Portugal and Estonia! At least Estonia received the decent placing they richly deserved.

So here's to Oslo 2010. As I hinted above, I hope the EBU look at tweaking the voting system a little further. For one thing, what's the point of having ordinary members of the public (ie. potential political voters) on the national juries when the public can vote by televote anyway?

My prediction for Eurovision final (Saturday)

I fared reasonably well with my top three prediction last year (I got the top two right, and my tip for third came sixth) so I'm going to be a bit more ambitious this time round and attempt the top five. Almost certainly a recipe for disaster, for as much as there's a red-hot favourite this year, the lower placings are very difficult to predict. For a long time I'd been feeling confident that, with both an extremely favourable draw and the Andrew Lloyd-Webber factor, the UK were set fair for a top five placing, but I'm now starting to get cold feet about that after the reports from today's rehearsals. Inexplicably, the juries vote after the final rehearsal, meaning that 50% of the vote is settled on the basis of something the audience don't actually get to see (can't be justified, surely?), so a less-than-perfect performance today may well have dented Jade's chances significantly. So, with that in mind, here's my wild stab in the dark...

Winners - Norway
2nd - Greece
3rd - Bosnia-Herzegovina
4th - Iceland
5th - Portugal

Possible dark horses - UK, Malta

I know I said last night that I thought we were heading back to Athens, and I'd stand by that if only Greece hadn't received such a significantly worse draw than Norway. I still personally don't fully understand the appeal of the Norwegian song, but there are times when a consensus of opinion is so strong you just can't ignore it.

I still can't make up my mind who I'll be voting for myself - with my personal rule of always voting for an entry entirely sung in a language other than English, it'll be either Portugal or Estonia, but on the basis of the semi-final performances they're quite evenly-matched for me. But my heart will be with the superb Icelandic entry all the way.

Of course, the fascination of tomorrow night will be to see how the new voting system works in practice. I suspect that although the political voting patterns will be somewhat diluted, they'll still be very noticeable. Let's not forget that Greece and Cyprus used to regularly swap 12 points even in the days when the voting was 100% jury.

YouGov sub-sample : well I think that answers my question!

I wondered aloud last night whether Labour's collapse in the latest UK-wide YouGov poll really heralded good news for the SNP, or whether the fringe parties would simply benefit at the expense of all the main parties in Scotland. But the detailed breakdown of the poll has now been released, and the Scottish sub-sample for the Westminster vote shows the following -

SNP 38% (+9)
Labour 27% (-1)
Conservatives 15% (-14)
Liberal Democrats 14% (+4)
Others 7% (+4)

As ever there is a huge health warning that needs to be attached to any sub-sample, but it does look potentially significant, especially since YouGov is the pollster that in the last few months has been consistently least likely to show the SNP in the lead for Westminster.

PS. I've just received one of those tedious "hard-working Scottish families love the Labour Party" leaflets - of course that sort of thing has always rung hollow for me, but I suddenly realised looking at it just how out-of-touch it's going to look to the average floating voter in the current circumstances.

What does the Labour freefall mean for the SNP?

Any lingering doubt that we are living in unprecedented political times was removed by the latest UK-wide YouGov poll showing Labour at an all-time low of 22%. By my reckoning, the combined figure for the 'others' also now stands at an astonishing 18%. On the face of it, good news for the SNP - but is it really? Clearly there's now an unprecedented anti-establishment mood out there, but the jury's also out on whether the electorate will still perceive the SNP as a true anti-establishment party, or whether they'll reserve that for fringe groups like UKIP, the Greens and the BNP. But even if the SNP take a small hit themselves, it surely can't compare with what is happening to Labour - and that being the case the signs are good for victory in the popular vote on June 4th.

Get rid of the old, take a hold and be free

My first reflection on tonight's Eurovision semi is that I think we're heading back to Athens next year. The staging of the Greek entry was quite breathtaking - it hardly seems to matter that it's an average sort of song, averagely sung. What does matter of course is that Sakis Rouvas is a major star across many parts of Europe, and all things considered I think he may just have the beating of Norway. On the other hand, I have to admit that I haven't entirely understood the widespread appeal of Norway from the moment I first heard it a couple of months ago! My other confession is that I actually voted against This is Our Night in the Greek national final (the first opportunity I'd ever had to vote in a non-UK selection) which may end up looking like a slightly silly decision in forty-eight hours' time. But then I voted for Yodel In The Canyon Of Love in 1997 as well...

As for my prediction, in spite of the momentary loss of nerve I mentioned on Twitter, I did fare slightly better this time and got nine out of ten right. My only blemish was that I thought Serbia would go through and Albania wouldn't. (Memo to Serbia - revert to one of those powerful ethnic ballads next year!) Funnily enough, when I was drawing up the list I pondered putting Albania in at the last minute - but if I had done it would have been Denmark I'd have left out. As ever, it'll be interesting to see which song was the jury pick.

I'm sure I'd already know the answer to this if I'd been following it closely enough over the last few months - but why were Greece and Cyprus paired together in the same semi-final? If the main purpose of the new (as in new last year) rules is to split up the various Eurovision old pals' act, none dates back further than the Greeks and the Cypriots.

Oh, and Estonia were indeed excellent. It'll be a close call between them and Portugal when I'm deciding how to vote on Saturday.

My prediction for second Eurovision semi-final (Thursday)

OK, having been unexpectedly side-tracked last night by the random appearance of a 10,000 word dissertation about something I wrote here a month ago (well I'm sure it happens to everyone at some point), back to serious matters. I didn't have much luck with my prediction on Tuesday (only seven out of ten correct), but that may have been partly because I had very strong feelings one way or the other about some of the songs involved. I'm feeling a little more 'detached' about tonight's semi, so let's see if I fare any better. The ten countries I think will qualify for the final tonight, in no particular order, are -

Ukraine
Azerbaijan
Denmark
Norway
Greece
Lithuania
Croatia
Serbia
Moldova
Estonia

Of course, living in the UK, I don't have a vote tonight but if I did I have a feeling I'd be plumping for Estonia. It fits my criteria of being entirely sung in a language other than English, but in actual fact I think it's the strongest song in the semi anyway. I'll be interested to see the live performance, though - it might help me decide whether I'll be voting for it on Saturday or sticking with the delightful Portuguese entry.

And can they please dispense with the magic button tonight..?