Ben Lowry: Boris Johnson seems well placed for this poll, but even so a left wing prime minister is likely in near future

Two of my colleagues said as much, and commented on how warmly Jeremy Corbyn was being received at election rallies.

So much of my own information comes from reading that I was not finding time to see much television coverage and so it was harder to sense the mood on the trail.

Yet it was no surprising to me that Mrs May failed to win an overall majority, and I wrote about the prospect on June 7 , on the eve of the election. I had been watching the rise in Labour’s percentage poll ratings, from low 20s at the start of the campaign to high 30s at the end.

Jeremy Corbyn went on to win 41% of the vote, which was 4% over his poll average of the last week, but only 2% above his best polling.

At an event in Belfast shortly before election day, several better number crunchers than me were saying they were no longer expecting Mrs May to get a majority of 100, but now perhaps 40 or 50. I remember asking whether they were saying that latter polling about Mr Corbyn’s improvement was wrong.

The polling was in fact correct, and led to a result that had huge consequences. Once the Tories failed to win outright, Brexit stalemate was likely.

This time Boris Johnson is in a better position than Mrs May. His opinion poll lead has been around 10%during the election campaign. It is a lowish lead compared to Mrs May’s massive 18-20 point lead at the start of the 2017 campaign. But unlike then, Labour is not making steady inroads into that lead.

Both parties are in fact rising in tandem, which suggests a continuation of the 2015 and 2017 trend of the two big parties getting 75%+ of the overall vote.

If so, the Liberal Democrats and Brexit Party will be squeezed.

Mr Johnson is, as expected, performing much better on the stump than Mrs May did. While he has ducked some interviews and debates, as she did, he is far more confident when he does appear.

However, there are still perils for the PM including the highly volatile nature of electorates now, not only from year to year, but also from place to place. Tactical shifts or informal voting pacts are happening in various places such as London and the west country and the North, as voters assess locally the best pro or anti Brexit candidate.

Tony Blair and John Major suggested just such tactical voting yesterday to thwart Mr Johnson.

Tactical voting might become a recurring feature of future elections, due to the increasing failure of the first-past-the-post-system to reflect accurately the wide spread of election results that we now get.

It is hard to see proportional representation being introduced any time soon, given that the idea was so thumpingly rejected by UK voters in the 2011 AV referendum.

Also, if Mr Corbyn performs 4% better on the day than the current opinion poll results for Labour, then Mr Johnson will still be ahead and will still be largest party, but will only scrape an overall majority — if he even gets one.

Even if Mr Johnson does win such a majority, and Mr Corbyn falls well short of victory, which experts still think the most likely outcome, I suspect a left wing government is not far down the tracks.

A key reason for this is the perception of inequality, fuelled by stupid and greedy crony capitalism.

Income inequality is in fact at its lowest level since the 1980s, due to measures such as the rise in the minimum wage. But a perception of high income inequality was apparent on BBC Question Time recently when a foolish member of the audience said £80,000 is an average salary. The average wage is around £27,0000 but if people at that average level wrongly perceive everyone else to be earning far more they will feel aggrieved.

Asset inequality genuinely is high, due to low interest rates, which have pushed property prices out of the reach of young people.

If home ownership rates continue to fall due to high home prices, fewer and fewer people will feel they have a stake in society and demands for radical action will grow.

Here in Northern Ireland there was barely any soul searching or examination of the crazy period in 2004 to 2007 when society cheer led the house price boom, leading to a crash and ruin for people who had over indebted themselves to get on the housing ladder. Many of them had been told by the elders ‘you can’t go wrong with property’.

A sense of inequality also helps explain the rise of Bernie Sanders in the US. I remember in 1990 when he was the only ‘socialist’ elected of 535 congressmen/senators. Such a tag in the US then had pariah status. Now he is a major political figure.

A firmly leftist leader could succeed in ‘conservative’ Britain too.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

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