How Strathclyde University professor Sir John Curtice became the man everyone trusts during an election

In the last six general elections, his exit poll has correctly predicting the largest party - in five of the six, the margin of error for that forecast was five parliamentary seats or fewer.

Through election day yesterday and into the night he has been collecting data and identifying patterns to help understanding of the local election results in England. Today he will be a regular fixture on the BBC’s television coverage of the Welsh and Scottish elections and has been widely quoted in this morning’s papers.

With unruly hair, frankly stated insight and unbridled enthusiasm, Curtice has become an unlikely media star: “I try to speak in human. I am trying to speak in ways that the general public will understand.

“Sometimes I kick one party and other times I kick the other,” he told the New York Times. “And usually I kick both of them.”

Sir John Curtice grew up in St Austell Cornwell. In an interview with The Guardian, he said his interest in electoral behaviour began when his parents, a carpenter and a market researcher, allowed him to stay up and watch the results show for the 1964 election. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford.

It was while he was a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, that he was first drawn into the television world of election analysis. He was taught by David Butler who was a frequent presence on the BBC around elections. Sir John’s job was to sit behind David in the studio with a programmable calculator to crunch the numbers on the swing of the vote quickly in case the BBC computer system went down.

His first breakthrough into broadcasting came when he persuaded the BBC to let him give an instant analysis of the 1981 London Council elections using the Oxford university computer: “Instant analysis for television was at the cutting edge of what you could do with digital technology” then, he told student newspaper Cherwell.

At the age of 72, the academic is still participating in a relentless churn of radio and television appearances through the day and night: “You don’t have time to think about going to sleep - it’s adrenaline, it’s intellectual excitement, it’s an intellectual challenge,” he says.

Curtice's wife, the Rev. Dr. Lisa Joan Curtice, is a social scientist who later retrained as a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church. They live together in the West End of Glasgow and have one daughter.

In 2018, he was given a knighthood in the Queen's New Year honours list. “A letter arrived from the Cabinet Office in November last year, which didn’t seem out of the ordinary – I very occasionally get letters from government departments. My first thought when I realised I was getting a knighthood was: well, I wasn’t expecting this! I had to keep it quiet for a while – even when a friend joked that I’d be next in the running, which I had to pass off as complete nonsense.

“The reaction when the news was announced was positive, a lot of people were extremely kind about it. Even many of those who aren’t particularly enamoured with the honours system were very gracious. It’s very affirming, really. People are basically saying you’re doing a good job.”

His high profile appearances at the heart of election coverage means he is often recognised in Glasgow. “It’s fine,” he says. “The only people who come up to you are the people who want to say something nice. People who think you’re crap won’t bother. So it’s an asymmetric group”.