Sir Keir Starmer might be a symptom not a cause of a long term Labour malaise. Sir Keir Starmer attracts a lot of criticism for his failure to perform better against Boris Johnson, looking at the polling figures (both voting intention and leadership metrics) it appears at the next general election Sir Keir is set play the role of Khalid bin Barghash to Boris Johnson’s Harry Rawson. I have a bit of sympathy for Starmer, one because of the toxic…
The Sunday Telegraph are reporting that Dawn Butler, a prominent Jeremy Corbyn ally, denied on Saturday she was preparing to challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership, amid claims of a hard-Left plot to replace the Labour leader after the Batley and Spen by-election. Ms Butler, who was a frontbencher under Mr Corbyn, was seen in the West Yorkshire constituency with a camera crew last week, leading to speculation that she was putting together material for a leadership bid. Labour…
And just two weeks later I find it very difficult to explain such a huge change within 2-weeks even though that period did include the May 6th local elections. Certainly, all the media narrative following the elections was questioning Starmer’s position and Labour’s performance which was reinforced by the party’s loss of the Hartlepool Westminster by-election. But in the counts that took place on the Friday and Saturday some less good results for the Tories emerged particularly in Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire,…
One of the reasons why Opinium is my favourite poster is because of the extensive way the firm presents its data and allows you to look at responses to one question and how it affected other responses. Last week’s big news was about the super league leading to Opinium including questions about this in its latest poll including one that tested the sample’s interest in football. So because of the extensiveness of the dataset, we can do comparisons on the…
Putting LAB’s current position into context Thanks to John Rentoul for Tweeting the above poll data from April 3rd 2020. As can be seen the immediate polling reaction to the start of lockdown was to get behind the government and the Prime Minister. You could easily argue that over the past year there has been a CON-LAB swing of nearly 10% but that simply ignores the strange times in which we live. This huge lead tapered off in the following…
Events overshadowing his election were even worse than for IDS in September 2001 I always felt sorry for IDS whose election as Tory leader was due to take place the the day after 9/11 – an event that so dominated the world that he never really had a chance to have a honeymoon period. But at least, unlike Keir Starmer, IDS was able to have a first conference speech within weeks and was not barred from shaking people’s hands. We…
One of the things that is rarely done in polling analysis is to look at geographical breakdowns breakdown like in the chart above based on the latest Opinium poll. In this case it is really important to take notice of this because of the huge gulf that it portrays between how Johnson and Starmer are perceived in London compared with views a hundred or so miles up the motorway in the Midlands and then the North. The clear pattern is…
He could become PM with LAB getting fewer votes and seats A big advantage for Starmer over Johnson at the next general election is that he is in with a good chance of becoming PM if the Tories lose their majority. This would be the case even if LAB has fewer seats. The converse is that Johnson’s Tories almost certainly have to win an overall majority of Commons seats to retain power. This is all because if Boris fails to…