In yesterday’s rather contrived election video from Boris Johnson in the style of Vogue magazine’s 73 questions, he is asked whether he prefers fish and chips or Sunday roast. “I think a fish and chips on a cold night on a beach — you can’t beat it,” he responds lyrically.

An inspired new analysis from political scientist Steve Pickering gives a clue as to why team Boris might have thought this worth mentioning in their first campaign video. He has analysed the most common type of restaurant from the pages of Yell.com in every constituency in the land, and produced this stunning map:

Fast food across Scotland, a little island of Italian in the middle of London, a belt of Indian around outer London and up the M40 to the West Midlands, good old fashioned pubs across rural and small town England — and then, clustered across those crucial Labour seats in the North as well as along the south coast, fish and chip shops.

Not being satisfied with a pretty map, Pickering conducts a proper statistical analysis of the relationship to the Brexit vote and concludes pretty unambiguously:

So there you have it. The Conservatives’ fish-n-chips strategy… classic Dom.

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Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.

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