Sweet F.A.

That time has come round again. A general election is in the offing and although there is a point where it is so far away that anything could happen, as time goes by more of the possibilities are eliminated until we reach the point where the result is a virtual certainty. And that is the point we have reached.

Why? Because it is time for the FA Cup Final. With the election due early in May next year, we will know on Saturday afternoon which club will be the FA Cup holders on election day. And that is all we need to know to use that most infallible of election prediction methods, the Sweet F.A. Prediction Model©. If the FA Cup holders at the time of the election are a team who traditionally wear shirts in the Conservative colours of blue or white, ignoring any black stripes, the Conservatives win most seats at the election. On the other hand, if they play in Labour's colours, red and/or yellow, Labour wins.

It is a number of years now since I first pointed out this remarkable phenomenon, and its record has remained unsullied since then. There have now been 16 elections since the War which have produced a clear winner, and the Sweet F.A. method has correctly predicted 14 of those 16. Even more convincingly, in the remaining election – that of February 1974, when no party had a clear win, Labour ending only 3 seats ahead - the Cup obliged by falling to a team whose shirts bear both parties' colours equally, the red-and-white-striped Sunderland. Surely so clear a pattern could not arise purely by chance?

* Would have been correct if Brighton & Hove Albion (BLUE) had not missed an open goal in the dying seconds of the FA Cup final, before losing the replay.

All of which means that we have known the result of the next general election for more than a month. Back in January, almost any result was possible (although, since there are no league teams that play in purple, poor Nigel Farage has never had much of a chance). Since then, however, the possibilities have narrowed. If the Liberal Democrats are ever to form a majority, the Cup will presumably be won by Tangerine-shirted Blackpool, but they didn’t last past the third round this year. The Greens’ last hopes were ended when Yeovil were knocked out in the fourth round. But David Cameron and his party still had hope until the semi-finals, when Wigan Athletic (blue and white stripes, Conservative victory) and Sheffield United (red and white stripes, no clear winner) both came to grief. Tomorrow’s final is between Arsenal (red) and Hull City (yellow and black stripes), either of whom should be harbingers of a Labour victory.

And that is the most positive prediction of the election result that you are likely to get out of any polling company for the foreseeable future.

Note for the literally-minded

I must reluctantly point out that the Sweet FA Prediction model© is not entirely serious. As should be obvious if you read to the end of the original article, it nevertheless had a serious purpose, to point out the pitfalls of assigning undue significance to patterns in past events when there is no reasonable excuse for assuming a causal link, and to distinguish between measurement (what opinion pollsters do) and prediction (what pundits and astrologers do). Those who have been paying attention will have noticed that I subtly amended the interpretation of the data after the 2010 election so as to ensure that the model correctly "predicted" its result. (According to the original model, the Cup should have been won by a team in stripes in 2009, since the 2010 election produced a hung Parliament.) This statistical technique is technically known as "moving the goalposts". If there is a hung Parliament after the 2015 general election I reserve the right to read new significance into Arsenal’s white sleeves. If the Tories win I will, no doubt, find some other twist. But have no doubt, if I’m still here in five years’ time I will have some infallible model with an extraordinary track record with which I can predict the 2020 general election. The truth is out there, but so are millions of billions of permutations of rubbish. Too much that passes that for political analysis these days, especially on the Internet, is entirely dependent on reading deep significance into coincidental associations between events. Much of the more naïve use of “big data” which is now becoming so fashionable has the same flaw. Unless you know why two phenomena coincide, that there really is a causal link between the two, such associations may well be meaningless.