OVER the past week, I asked a carefully selected cross section of 10 dealers for their predictions on the outcome of the General Election.
Five predicted a dead heat and a hung parliament, four thought that Ed Milliband would grab power, and three said that David Cameron would cross the line first. Which says more about my maths than their political insight.
Like most, my jaw hit the ground when the BBC announced the result of their exit poll at 10 pm last night. It was way, way above every single pollster’s predictions for months rather than the last few weeks.
It came about because huge swathes of people had apparently not made up their mind, but also more likely they told the pollster to “mind their own b…. business’!
Rather like those irritating survey forms they hand out in hotels, we are getting fed up with being asked to give our opinion on every aspect of day-to-day living. I exempt of course the questions we ask Service Dealer readers from time to time about the trends within their business! Nonetheless, I can quite imagine that many dealers also mouth ‘mind your own business’.
In the end, it came down to two factors. The stunning sweep of the SNP across Scotland – and the economy. It had seemed strange that the Conservatives had not gained more traction from the gradually improving economy during the election campaign. Business confidence has been seeping back over the past couple of years, and most people outside the UK seemed to recognise that more strongly than we did.
But, whilst the political road ahead is sure to be tricky for the Tories, at least we have a decisive result – and for that we must be grateful.
AT LEAST yesterday, Election Day, the airwaves were a politics-free zone. What a change from the endless wall-to-wall punditry – which turned out to be way off anyway.
How apt that it should co-incide with the 70th Anniversary of VE Day, when the guns finally fell silent in Europe. I don’t remember much about 8 May 1945 because I was barely three years old – but probably more significantly, it was the day that a taste for alcohol was possibly awakened.
My parents had the VE party to end all parties in our modest bungalow, and I trotted round taking a sip out of any glass left lying around obviously, thinking it was just another flavour of Corona (popular fizzy fruit drink of the time, not a Mexican beer with a slice of lime stuck in the neck).
I probably slept round several clocks afterwards, but if that was what victory tasted like – bring it on . . . ! Now, where’s that Cabernet Corona?
