Scoping the damage of the Cummings road trip and Johnson’s decision to ignore it
Johnson leader ratings
We all know that on Friday May 22nd the Guardian and the Mirror first broke the story of the trip to Durham by Cummings and his family just before the Easter Weekend. Over the following few days it was just about the biggest thing dominating the UK media and everybody it seemed had an opinion.
The question is how has this hurt the Tories and Johnson. The above tables show the voting intention and leader ratings from the relevant period.
On voting intention things were moving a bit away from the previous heights that the Tories had achieved during April so the trend was downwards anyway. It looks as though the party has dropped about four points since the Cummings indiscretion was revealed.
The big impact, though has been on Johnson’s leader ratings which have moved very sharply. YouGov’s latest well/badly ratings have Johnson down 20% on early May. Opinium is down 14% while with Survation the slippage is in single figures.
A big question is whether the voting intention position is the best indicator or the leader numbers. What I find remarkable is how little the leader rating change is reflected in the voting figures.