Two weeks away from polling day – and hasn’t it seemed like a very long election – we’re in what I call the ‘what if?’ stage of analysis.

It’s taken for granted that Labour will have a very good election and that the Conservatives will be stuffed. But since we live in such strange times, no-one should dismiss the possibility of a major surprise.

Polls now have a tendency to leap around in the last two or three days (we’re already seeing some evidence of that in Reform closing in on the Conservatives), delivering outcomes that were routinely dismissed a few weeks earlier.

Just look at what happened to Sinn Féin in the Euro and local elections: plunging from biggest party status with ratings of 30% in the polls to come in with an average of around 12%.

Newton Emerson: Could Sinn Féin’s southern woes be good news for Stormont?

Feeney on Friday: Unionists need to realise that when English politicians talk about the ‘union’, they mean Scotland

Mary Lou McDonald accepted that it “hasn’t been our day” and promised to examine every aspect of the campaign. Meanwhile, a member of her party put it more graphically to me: “It’s been a complete bollix and most of the people running the campaign don’t seem to have any idea why.”

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