Dan Hodges is The Mail on Sunday’s ‘election guru’, and something of a Twitter troll. But on Monday 29 January, he hit a wall of pain when someone armed with facts called time on his nonsense.
Who the f*ck is Hodges?
Supporters of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will know Hodges as one of his most frequent and hysterical critics. But there’s more to the man.
Dan Hodges used to describe himself as the “Blairite cuckoo in the Labour nest”. Despite this ‘Blairite’ rebranding, it’s worth remembering Hodges once considered himself instrumental in bringing the former Labour leader down. In 2014, he wrote:
As no one in the Labour party appears willing to admit their part in the plot to bring down Tony Blair, I’ll cough. I was up to my neck in it.
I briefed and span. Placed stories. Sowed seeds of confusion and dissent.
By the 2017 general election, he was writing for The Mail on Sunday and finally switched his vote to Conservative.
His political predictions are legendary. Who knew one man could be so wrong, so consistently? He confidently predicted the victories of both David Miliband and Hillary Clinton.
But Hodges is at his worst with his faux concern on antisemitism. He has done much to conflate Corbyn’s opposition to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, with hatred of Jewish people. Here’s how Hodges (not Jewish) responded when a Jewish blogger asked him to stop using Judaism as a political football:
What a guy.
And he continues peacocking about the place like a Poundland Mystic Meg.
Hodges vs facts
Two and a half years into Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, Hodges finally asked the question he should have started with.
The thing I will never understand about last June is how such a dramatic transformation in Labour's vote share occurred almost entirely undetected by any of the parties.
— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) January 29, 2018
And he didn’t like the answer.
And almost none of those polls showed the Tory lead narrowing by such a dramatic amount that it resulted in a hung parliament.
— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) January 29, 2018
The polls, the local election results, and polling from both parties all pointed to comfortable Tory majority. Yet you're arguing "rational" analysis should have predicted a hung-parliament?
— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) January 29, 2018
Then, noting the ‘Batsh*t signal’ in the sky like some sort of evidence-based super hero, in came Alex Nunns. As author of The Candidate, which charts the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, Nunns was pretty well-placed to help out.
https://twitter.com/alexnunns/status/957950697802293250
Hodges, reluctant to learn, kept swinging and missing.
https://twitter.com/alexnunns/status/958057335779446785
And it just kept going. Using the Mail hack’s own tweets, Nunns revealed exactly why Hodges and his peers failed to predict the Corbyn surge. Because they didn’t want it to happen.
Warming up for the home straight.
Ouch.
And in conclusion.
The thread will likely be doing the rounds on Twitter for eternity. Which would be an entirely fitting epitaph to the career of Dan Hodges.
This thread is like watching The Undertaker brutally maul a jobber in a steel cage. For people like Hodges, of course, their flightiness, their lack of principle or rigour, their ability to flounder and get right back up and say it all again, is a career goldmine. https://t.co/lR5tSuC4Pd
— Richard Seymour (@leninology) January 30, 2018
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