Our survey: Jenrick opens up a sixty-point lead over Badenoch in our latest Shadow Cabinet League Table

There are two important trends in our latest Shadow Cabinet League Table. The first is Robert Jenrick starting to break decisively away from the rest of the pack, and the second is the air slowly going out of the rest of the scores.

Let’s start with the headline. Since last month’s survey, the Shadow Justice Secretary has put on 13.5 points. Not a bad month-on-month increase in itself, but it looks especially dramatic here because it pushes his net score north of +70. In fact, it is now almost exactly where Kemi Badenoch’s score stood before she began her slide in the ratings, as charted in our graphic.

Her score slipped again this month, albeit not by much: from +10.6 to +9. Her ranking actually increased slightly (from 14th to 12th) due to the overall fall, to which we’ll return below. But the gulf between herself and Jenrick now stands at a whopping 60 points – an uncomfortable deficit for any monarch to have with a prince over the water.

Yet it is, perhaps, hardly surprising. If you somehow teleported someone from the hall before the result was announced last November, and showed them this video (or any of the others like it), who would they assume had won? Even setting aside any question of each candidate’s personal attributes, the sheer resource gap revealed by comparing Jenrick’s video output to CCHQ’s is obvious, and remarkable.

On the lower slops of the podium, Mel Stride also had a good month: his score is only just shy of where stood Jenrick’s last month. Meanwhile Chris Philp has more-or-less stood still (and thus lost the silver medal position), but there is now much more definition to the top three due to the dramatic falling back of James Cartlidge, whose score has more than halved from +40 to +17.

How much of that is the Shadow Defence Secretary’s fault must be in doubt, however, given the general state of the table, where the overall trend is decidedly downward.

Most obviously, there are now five shadow ministers in negative ratings (although poor Alan Mak’s reign as lanterne rouge remains secure). But above that the dropoff is clearly visible from a side-by-side comparison of the tables. Below is a list of how many shadow cabinet members had a score in a given ten-point range this month and last, with the change in brackets (excluding the Scottish and Welsh leaders):

• +70s: 1 | 0 (+1)
• +60s: 0 | 0 (-)
• +50s: 1 | 1 (-)
• +40s: 1 | 3 (-2)
• +30s: 1 | 2 (-1)
• +20s: 1 | 2 (-1)
• +10s: 5 | 10 (-5)
• +00s: 11 | 7 (+4)
• -00s: 4 | 1 (+3)
• -10s: 1 | 0 (+1)

Given the margin of error, and the difficulty of even so engaged an audience as our panel maintaining detailed opinions on all 26 members of the Shadow Cabinet, these figures likely tell a more useful story than minutely examining small changes amongst those in the middle of the table.

In aggregate, they show a serious fall in membership contentment, and an end to the “disconnect” we noted in last month’s survey, where there seemed to be more air going into the scores overall even as Badenoch’s personal rating declined. The bottom is not yet dropping out of the table – but the middle is dropping into the bottom.More dangerously still for the leadership, they also suggest that the membership might be gravitating towards a solution.

Onward to the locals.