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Tactical voting to beat the Tories: does the maths equal a coalition? | Science | The Guardian

At present, the Tories look set to win about 392 seats with Labour crashing to the Hagueish total of 170. A perfectly-executed Lab/Lib pact could reduce that to about 361, handing 25 seats to Labour and 6 to the Lib Dems. If all progressive voters were directed by an all-seeing omnipotent god-being to perfectly optimize their vote then the Tories would land in the 330s. That would still leave them over 100 ahead of Labour (on 217) and be enough to form a majority. In summary: even if a progressive coalition made any sort of political sense in a reality where Tim Farron and Nicola Sturgeon would have to prop up a guy who can’t even claim a majority of his own MPs; it would require a polling error unlike anything we’ve ever seen combined with literally an act of God for it to work.

The vicar’s daughter is more of a gambler than she realises | Andrew Rawnsley | Opinion | The Guardian

That’s motive and opportunity covered. Means are trickier. Before 2010, a prime minister could get an election simply by heading down to Buckingham Palace to ask for one. Now there is the obstacle of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act to be navigated. It certainly makes life more complicated for the prime minister. Still, where there was a will, many of her MPs think, Mrs May could find a way. The simplest mechanism would be to ask parliament to approve an election and dare the opposition parties to say no and make themselves look scared of the people. Quite a lot of Labour MPs would even relish it in a kind of way to get the misery of the Corbyn era behind them.

Hilary Benn seeks shadow cabinet backing to oust Corbyn | Politics | The Guardian

Leaked internal Labour party polling suggested that Labour would attract nearly 3 million fewer votes than it did in the 2015 general election if one were called today. It shows that just 71% of those who voted for Ed Miliband’s Labour party in May last year say they would vote Labour now, and this drops further – to 67% – among working and lower middle-class C2DE voters.

The (Not So) Fixed-term Parliaments Act | Blog

Under the FTPA, Parliament’s fixed five-year term can only be truncated in two ways. First, if more than two thirds of the House of Commons vote to call an election – and that means 434 of the 650 MPs, not just two thirds of those in the chamber. The second is more complicated. If a motion of no confidence is passed or there is a failed vote of confidence, there is a 14-day period in which to pass an act of confidence in a new government. If no such vote is passed, a new election must be held, probably a mere 17 working days later.

'Bathetic and Pathetic': Corbyn's Normcore Schtick Is Utterly Ineffectual | VICE | United Kingdom

But despite all these agenda-setting handicaps, the astonishing thing about Corbyn is that he's managing to cock things up entirely on his own terms. What I mostly felt watching the documentary was anger − an anger which, as bathetic and pathetic scenes alternated, muted into annoyance, before finally curdling to become mere... pity, which is hardly a vote-winner. Corbyn and his team say they're determined to impose a new kind of politics on Westminster and the country at large − an open, inclusive, and non-divisive politics, expressive of their underlying socialist-democratic principles; but what the film depicts is a gaggle of incompetent advisors and ill-informed supporters, all dedicated to the task of putting a man in No 10 Downing Street who's clearly not up to the job.