Westminster completely lost its mind on Friday afternoon – and what you may have seen on social media or the occasional TV or radio segment was just the tip of the iceberg of hysteria.
In the space of a few hours, the prospect of Susan Hall becoming mayor of London went from being ridiculous to something that journalists across the political spectrum were eager to point out when they said it was a serious possibility, if not just a few weeks ago. So months ago.
In the self-preserving manner of those who make public statements on upcoming events at Westminster, the guys left themselves too much leeway – making a declaration bold enough so that if Susan Hall won, they could claim to have predicted it. But if she lost, he only said it would be closer than anticipated.
However, all this came without anyone coming up with a single piece of new information. No votes were counted for Mayor of London on Friday. There was no exit poll for the mayoral race. There were some rumors of what might have been picked up from the “sample” while the votes were being verified – and these are usually few.
This did not stop the media consensus from insisting that the polls were inaccurate, that the mayoral race would be very close, and that Susan Hall could very well win.
Suzanne Hall did not win. It wasn’t close. The surveys were not wrong. And whenever any real information came in — the first actual vote totals, after counting began on Saturday — it was clear that all the rumors were wildly wrong. Sadiq Khan defeated Susan Hall by almost 280,000 votes – a much bigger lead than his first-choice victory over Shaun Bailey in 2021. The Tories lost.
Many sinister explanations have been offered for this debacle, as is usual in modern British politics. Was someone deliberately telling false “good” news to get better headlines for Number 10? If that were the case, what would be the point of even worse headlines if the real, dire consequences would emerge just a day later?
The reality is more mundane: Westminster runs on gossip and abhors news blackouts. If a general election is called on 2 May, London decided to postpone the counting of votes for Mayor and the London Assembly until Saturday – so that Westminster votes could be counted first. Then it stuck to that crooked schedule, even when no one else was.
Against that silence, small whispers go a long way. A senior local party leader may comment that he is hearing better news than expected from his campaigners, and perhaps that means the result may be close. A senior party source says it is closer than expected.
The Westminster rumor wheels begin to whirr – as journalists ask each other, politicians ask each other, and the two groups cross-pollinate. During Friday afternoon, various politics-related WhatsApp groups became heated with speculation – what started as idle turned almost furious. Far more people were caught by the rumor that “Susan has won” than by what was posted publicly.
After a while, the pack instinct kicks in: If everyone thinks it’s close, why don’t you think so too? All this is fueled by a surprisingly large portion of politicians and journalists who dislike and distrust polls – and have never learned how they work or what they mean (prediction The debacle of how “estimated national vote share” was used to determine the hung parliament is just one example).
And so why let polling, or the absence of any real data, prevail? On Friday and Saturday, by the time the real results started coming in, the waves were too powerful to fight.
Political journalism sometimes means making educated, public, guesses that may prove wrong tomorrow. Everyone has done it, and everyone has had to be wrong in public – although admitting it is usually much better than pretending you weren’t actually wrong because [elaborate explanation here],
However, it was a mess – and political journalists tend to be bad at following politics, almost because everyone is too close to the picture to see it properly. Because of the need to feed the beast, to tell a narrative, to spread the “buzz,” it can be all too easy to ask if there is any substance – is there fire behind this smoke, or is someone just here and there. Is dry ice moving?
There is also a serious side to some of this, although this should not be exaggerated: there is a significant far-right group that is obsessed with Sadiq Khan and uses him as the center of racist conspiracy theories. These have made it as far as Donald Trump, who just this week spewed racist nonsense about London and its mayor.
Already such people are taking advantage of the combination of long delays in counting — and the consensus of pundits that the vote will be close — to share baseless conspiracy theories that false votes have been cast en masse. Expect to see more of these in the future.
It would be too far to blame those people for this controversy, although they certainly couldn’t help it. And it seems unlikely that this will be the event that changes Westminster politics or the way elections are reported.
But if nothing else, there’s a way to get at least one element right: For the love of all that is good in the world, please can London officials agree that at the next mayoral election Whatever happens during this period, will the votes be counted overnight?