DIE POLITIK, said Bismarck, ist keine exacte Wissenschaft: "Politics is not an exact science." Few, of course, would disagree in principle, but there are those who believe that the inexactitude can be minimised with a little meteorology - as evidenced, for example, by the daily habits of the 18th century raconteur, Matthew Green:
Or to some coffee house I stray,
For news, the manna of a day,
And from the hipp'd discourses gather
That politics go by the weather
Tradition and common sense agree that good weather favours a high turn out at election time - although everyone has his or her own ideas as to who will benefit the most. It follows that if you want to maximise the poll, you improve the chances by holding the election in the summertime, as the Government is doing today. But this rule is not infallible.
When Harold Wilson declared a June election in Britain in 1970, he was confident that the warm sunny conditions typical of that time of year would encourage those of his own persuasion to register their votes to superfluity. He was sadly disappointed; it turned out to be the wettest June for years, and the thundery rain set all his plans awry.Could it be, however, that there may be some advantage weatherwise in choosing one day of the week as polling day rather than another? In the 1960s a meteorologist called Walters examined London's rainfall, computing the total number of hours during which rain was falling between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on each of the seven days of the week over a six year timespan.
He found that on average Saturday was the wettest day of the week, followed, in order of wetness, by Thursday, Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. In the unlikely event of these conclusions being transferable to Ireland, they would suggest that, on average, a slightly higher poll could be expected on a Friday than on the traditional Thursday.
But sceptical meteorologists would point out that if you separate the rainfall figures for any given period into seven lots corresponding to the days of the week, the totals will never coincide exactly; one of the seven days must inevitably turn out to he the wettest, and another to be the day on which the least amount of rain has fallen. What matters is whether the difference turns out to be what scientists would call "statistically significant" - and there is no evidence that this is so. It seems unlikely, therefore, that the key to future government is to be found in the rainfall statistics of the marginal constituencies.