If you want to know what happens next in the UK, you’d be better off flipping a coin than listening to most political pundits, argues Adam Bienkov
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In 2011, US academics conducted a study of predictions made by leading political pundits. Of the 26 supposed experts they looked at, just nine had a successful predictive rate higher than 50%. Overall you were just as likely to get an accurate prediction from flipping a coin as you were from listening to most major commentators. In some cases a coin toss was a significantly more reliable indicator.
Similar studies conducted in the UK proved to be even worse for the pundits. In the run up to the 2010, 2015 and 2017 general elections, well known British commentators were asked by the Political Studies Association to give their predictions for each result. In each case, the pundits were wildly wrong, with tossing a coin turning out to be a significantly better way of predicting election outcomes.
No year has demonstrated this fallibility of political commentators more clearly than 2022. After 12 months in which we have had three Prime Ministers, a major European war and an economic crisis, the predictions of our political pundits and politicians have been shown up like never before
Here are just some of the worst predictions about how 2022 would turn out.
‘Boris Johnson Will Outlast Critics’
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson entered 2022 beneath a wave of reports suggesting that he had broken his own Covid laws and misled Parliament in the process.
Evidence from Downing Street whistleblowers suggested that Johnson had been at the head of an organisation which had widely disregarded the rules it had imposed upon the rest of the country.
Meanwhile Conservative MPs reported that they were experiencing a scale of fury from their constituents that they had never experienced before.
To many people outside Westminster it seemed obvious that the scandal would be the beginning of the end for the Prime Minister.
However, as dark skies gathered over Downing Street, the consensus among most of his supporters in the press was that he would survive the scandal.
The Sun declared that Johnson was “Crust Ahead” of his detractors, while the Daily Mail reported that Downing Street were “confident” he would survive, and suggested that the country had “lost all sense of proportion” about the Prime Minister, who they later declared to be “in the clear”.
Others claimed that Johnson had won over his many detractors in the party by promising to change, with one MP telling Politico that after one meeting between the Prime Minister and his backbenchers it was “back to maximum Boris, election-winning Boris.”
Within months they had forced him out.