UK political pundit Matthew Goodwin eats own book on TV for giving wrong election prediction

A British politics professor has followed through with his promise to 'eat his own words' after he underestimated Labour's popularity at the 2017 general election on 8 June.

Matthew Goodwin, a senior fellow at the Chatham House think-tank and academic at the University of Kent, said he would carry out the stunt if Jeremy Corbyn's party won more than 38% of the vote.

Labour ended up securing 40% of the total popular vote, a 9.6% increase on the 2015 general election under former leader Ed Miliband.

The shock performance meant Corbyn was able to deny Theresa May a majority in the House of Commons, with the prime minister having to form a controversial alliance with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in a bid to stay in power.

The fallout from the vote, which May called to strengthen her mandate ahead of two-year-long Brexit talks with the EU, has led to the resignation of top Number 10 aides Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.

Goodwin said in a briefing to journalists that Labour's growth in the polls was partly down to Corbyn winning over a coalition of young people with a "radical left-wing pitch".

"Especially women, those who voted for Labour in 2015 but until recently had not swung behind Corbyn, some 'non-voters' who abstained in 2015, and some former Liberal Democrats and Greens," he said.

"At the start of the campaign, for example, 38% of women aged 18-34 years old told Panelbase that they intended to vote Labour, which by last week had rocketed to 64%. Similarly, while in April only 64% of Labour's 2015 voters backed the party, by last week this had jumped to 78%.

"And while only 5% of Liberal Democrats were jumping to Labour by last week this was up to 22%. We should be careful with these numbers because the samples are small but they point to the general areas of growth."

But Goodwin, author of Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union, claimed that Labour's electorate is "still quite weak".

"Obviously, one big area concerns turnout and the extent to which groups that say they will vote Labour will actually turnout to do so," he said.

"But even putting that to one side, there also remain a number of unwritten laws about elections and voting, or what you might call 'the fundamentals' - each of which signifies a hurdle for Corbyn but when combined impose what I will argue is simply an insurmountable barrier for the current Labour Party."

Corbyn is staying on as Labour leader after the result and, with 30 new Labour MPs, a reshuffle of his top team may come over the coming weeks.