Good afternoon. Since I last wrote to you, the following things have happened. Long and delirious paragraph follows.
Three new MRP polls predicted varying degrees of Conservative annihilation, the worst of them projecting a collapse to 53 seats and prompting a Daily Telegraph front page headline in a font size normally reserved for mass casualty events in the home counties: “Tory Wipeout”. The Gambling Commission was revealed to be looking into a second Conservative hopeful, Bristol North West candidate Laura Saunders (pictured above, centre), over an alleged bet on the timing of the election. Michael Gove compared the Tory campaign to the Scotland football team, which you will recall lost 5-1 to Germany on Friday. Jeremy Hunt admitted he might lose his own seat. Laura Saunders’ husband turned out to be the Conservatives’ director of campaigning, Tony Lee, who is also facing questions from the Gambling Commission and has taken a leave of absence two weeks out from the election. Bloomberg reported that (£) Tory campaign resources are being moved out of constituencies with majorities of around 10,000 because they are no longer viewed as winnable. The Conservatives deleted an unfortunately timed social media post that warned “if you bet on Labour, you can never win” alongside a video of a roulette wheel, that had already been viewed 1.4m times. Promotion started for Boris Johnson’s forthcoming book, with a picture of the former prime minister looking like a particularly monstrous horror movie villain, and the tagline: “UNLEASHED”.
