The biggest surprise of the scandal around the PM's overmighty chief advisor breaking lockdown is that the UK is starting to react to it like an actual scandal - the press have knives out for Johnson and a minister has resigned over the issue. It feels weirdly like scandals used to feel back when I first remember being interested in politics: the government really taking noticeable political damage and, importantly, not having anyone else to really deflect onto. This may be part of the thing of having a secure majority government for the first time in a long time, the tabloids are now lacking targets outside the government to fire at and, in need of fuel to sell papers, are forced to turn their fire inwards.
Meanwhile Labour's numbers have been creeping up but not surging since Keir Starmer became leader, as much at the expense of the Liberal Democrats as of the Conservatives.
The Lib Dems have finally announced our leadership contest timings, which will be August through to September. Wera Hobhouse and Layla Moran have signalled their intention to run and Ed Davey is widely expected to do likewise: new MP Daisy Cooper was touted as a possible candidate and is known to be ambitious enough to want the job, but has backed out this time. Of the candidates, Hobhouse is running on a strategy of explicitly hugging Labour much more tightly and avoiding talk of "equidistance", though she's probably one of the less lefty candidates economically - she's also probably one of the most hardline Europhiles of the candidates. Without Cooper running, Moran is pretty clearly the candidate of the party's radical wing and probably of its centre-left more widely, she's very strongly socially liberal and is going to have minimum income as a core of her campaign strategy. She's also probably the candidate who invests most in the idea of member-led politics: I'm very much a shouty voice in the party for democratic policymaking, and Layla reliably comes across as at least as committed to it as I am which is rare in senior party figures. He main drawback is a known past arrest over a household dispute where she lashed out physically at an ex-boyfriend: she wasn't charged and both she and her ex-partner say they've moved on, but it's the sort of thing the press can get their teeth into and Davey supporters have been making jabs about her having baggage. Ed Davey is the most establishment of the three candidates, and has the longest political CV by a mile, and will basically be running as the safest pair of hands, though he's also being explicitly pro minimum income as a play for the party's left. He's known for being quite a hardball dealer with Conservatives in coalition where he was Energy and Climate Change minister, though he's equally been heavily criticised within the party for being too willing to defend coalition-era spending cuts.