When Britain goes to the polls for its July 4 general election, one person may know the result before anyone else.
John Curtis, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, will spend Election Day with his team to refine the results of the national exit polls. At 10pm, before any results are calculated, he will make a big and bold prediction that will be announced on national television: the winner.
“The lovely thing about the time between 10 o’clock and 11:30 pm is that no one knows!” Professor Curtis said with a smile, raising his hands. “From that moment on, we had no real government.”
While he is right that no one will know the final tally until the votes are cast in Britain’s 650 constituencies, his team’s exit polls have proven to be astonishing in the past six general elections. Accurate, correctly predicting the largest political parties every time. Five of the six countries have forecast margins of error of five or less.
The 70-year-old professor has a formidable intellect, unruly gray hair and an infectious enthusiasm, a record that is one of the reasons he has become an unlikely media star. But his beloved status in Britain runs even deeper. His candor and strict nonpartisanship have made him a rare figure in a polarizing era and a trusted source of information across the political spectrum.
“I try to speak in human language. I try to speak in a way that the public can understand,” he told the New York Times over a frugal lunch of tuna sandwiches in the atrium below the BBC’s Westminster studios.
“Sometimes I kick one side, sometimes I kick the other side,” he said. “Usually I kick both of them.”
“You don’t have time to think about sleep”
In February, as the broadcaster awaited the results of special elections for two parliamentary constituencies, Professor Curtis stood in front of the TV lights at 10pm and a BBC News producer adjusted his headphones.
His analysis had a characteristic flow, as did the 20 or so interviews he completed on the TV show, which lasted until breakfast the next day.
He had coffee and a bowl of porridge in the BBC cafeteria around 6am before striding to the broadcaster’s broadcast studios to continue his media offensive until it ended at 4pm. An exciting 18 hours.
“You don’t have time to think about sleep – it’s adrenaline, it’s intellectual excitement, it’s intellectual challenge,” he said.
He is prepared, however, with a laptop filled with data from previous elections, records that may or may not be broken, and his thoughts on how to summarize the most likely scenarios.
Professor Curtis’s first political memory was the election of Harold Wilson as leader of the opposition Labor Party in 1963. A year later, he was allowed to stay up late on election night, when Wilson won a slim majority that put Labor in power for the first time in 13 years.
“Don’t ask me why, I just think it’s funny,” he said.
He grew up in Cornwall, on England’s rugged coastline. His father worked in construction and his mother was a part-time market researcher. The family was wealthy and owned a detached house with a large garden (but no central heating).
Professor Curtis studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University and was a contemporary of Tony Blair, who later became British Prime Minister, but their paths did not cross. While Mr Blair was playing in a rock band called The Ugly Rumors, young Professor Curtis was a choral scholar and spent two hours a day attending Vespers.
As a graduate student, his advisor, David Butler, urged him to become “statistically literate.”
His first televised election night appearance was in 1979, the night Margaret Thatcher came to power. Equipped with a calculator he had written himself, he provided Professor Butler with statistical backup in case the BBC’s mainframe failed.
However, it was the exit polls that made Professor Curtis famous. He first became involved in 1992, later telling the Guardian it was “not a pleasant experience” as polls predicted a hung parliament instead of John Major for the Conservatives 21 seats won.
Since 2001, new models he created with another academic, David Firth, have improved the accuracy of forecasts, sometimes to the dismay of politicians. In 2015, former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown promised to eat his hat if exit polls predicted the party would retain just 10 seats out of nearly 60. In fact, it won even less often. During the next night’s TV show, Mr Ashdown was presented with a chocolate cake in the shape of a hat.
Today, the exit polls are jointly commissioned by the three national broadcasters – the BBC, ITV and Sky News. On July 4, tens of thousands of voters across the country will receive a mock ballot as they leave their polling stations and be asked to privately mark how they voted.
Polls in 2017 correctly predicted that instead of increasing her majority in parliament, as she and many analysts expected, Theresa May would lose seats. In 2019, Boris Johnson’s majority was projected to be reduced by just three seats.
However, Professor Curtis is far from complacent, pointing out that disruption is always a possibility – as happened in 2015 when exit polls showed a hung parliament but David Cameron reluctantly A slim majority was obtained. “People think there’s some magic in this, but our capabilities depend on the data,” Professor Curtis said.
“Very, very unlikely”
Exit polls are the trickiest when an election is near. This time, the Conservative Party, which has been in power for 14 years, has been trailing the opposition Labor Party by about 20 percentage points in opinion polls for 18 months. While such leads typically shrink in the final weeks of a campaign, the Conservatives need to make modern electoral history to win.
Professor Curtis said the chance of them forming the next government was less than 5 per cent – “statisticians say: it’s very, very unlikely.” This was partly because, he added, even if the Conservatives beat expectations And the result was a hung parliament and a lack of allies that would allow them to stay in power as a minority government.
Professor Curtis was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2017 and is now famous enough for strangers to say hello to him on the street. His name appeared on social media on election night, and there was a tribute account on X dedicated to tracking his media appearances called “Is Sir John Curtis on TV?(Today, the answer is usually “yes.”)
Could this be his last appearance on general election television? He said it was something he considered after voting. “If the next election is in five years and I’m 75, who knows?”
He also had other interests: a passion for classical music, church, family and caring for the Glasgow Community Garden.
But now, the country needs him. “There are a lot of experts who know a lot but can’t translate it in a way that’s clear to the audience,” BBC News anchor Nicky Schiller said after interviewing Professor Curtis on the night of February’s special election. And, he added, “He was a joy to work with.”
