A tale of two polls, and two parties

In 2020, a year on from the 2019 general election, YouGov had Labour’s net favourability at -15. The Opposition was not in a good place; the Hartlepool by-election, after which Sir Keir Starmer reportedly considered resigning after the Conservatives won it on a 23-point swing, lay in the future.

Yet they were at least still nine points ahead of the Tories, whose own net favourability at the same point was -24, and their score wasn’t so far underwater as all that – at least compared to today. In its latest poll, YouGov finds the two main parties’ net favourability thus: Labour -30, Conservatives -44.

That is obviously bad news for both, but it is indisputably better news for Labour. They are unpopular, but only a few points more than were the Tories at roughly the same point in the last parliament, and the Tories, as we saw, had a lot of ruin left in them at that point.

But there is also a big difference, which is that despite being in government they are still ahead, and by a substantial margin. Meanwhile the Conservatives, coming up to a year after the general election, are about three times further underwater on this metric than was Labour a year after its own rout in 2019.

Worse still, from the perspective of a leadership whose main pitch remains a plea for patience, the trend line isn’t going in the right direction.

So far, so cataclysmic. But then we have this latest poll from More in Common which shows the Conservatives ahead of Labour – and on headline voting intention, too!

In previous times, these would seem to be powerfully contradictory signals. This country has since the 1920s had only two parties of government; which of them does the public really want?

Not this time, however. That More in Common poll has the Conservatives on just 22 per cent, a point ahead of Labour on 21 per cent… and seven points behind Reform UK, on 29 per cent. You need to add all three scores together, plus the Liberal Democrats (13 per cent), to get to the sort of combined score the two main parties between them used to post.

There’s no comfort for the Tories in that second poll. Yes, it is nicer to be ahead of Labour than not, even if it is by a small enough margin to be well within the margin of error. But the overall number is a disaster, which if true means the party has shed just shy of a couple of per cent of the vote even compared to last year’s election, which was an historic rout.

Despite their contradictions, from CCHQ’s perspective these polls do describe a shared scenario, and it is the one warned against by people when word started getting out of Kemi Badenoch’s plans for a slow-and-steady two-year rebuild: that with a threat to the right that didn’t exist in 1997, the party simply did not have the luxury of being able to quit the field that long.

Nigel Farage has made the best of the opening, and seems for now at least to have successfully established Reform as the Government’s primary challenger, at least in the realm of public opinion – something which he was by no means guaranteed to pull off late last year.

Reform could fall back, of course, or fall to pieces. It is not completely unheard of for the third party to take a polling lead in the middle of a parliament, as did the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the early 1980s.

But if Farage can sustain the sort of ‘mid-term’ triumphs of the sort his party secured at the local elections, his claim to being the primary challenger will grow more and more credible. And as the Tories should well know (they have benefited from it often enough), it is harder to dislodge someone from a throne than to prevent them from taking it.

The critical question now is: does one fifth of the electorate represent the Conservatives’ floor? One very small silver lining of the current position is that Farage is having to pivot towards appealing to potential Labour switchers, for example by discovering a deeply-held objection to the two-child limit on Universal Credit. This could lead to his neglecting centre-right voters; a challenger can perhaps kill one of the major parties, but not both at the same time.

Yet it would be foolish for the Tory leadership to be complacent on that basis. It is only the exercise of power that really forces a party to make hard choices and define itself, and thus its support base; Farage might pay a heavy price one day for assembling a coalition too broad to cohere behind any programme (as Starmer is), but for the leader of a third party that would be a very nice problem to have.

Nor is their any guarantee that the Lib Dems will remain on 13 per cent. Sir Ed Davey might campaign as if he’s auditioning for Takeshi’s Castle, but he’s spotted the gap in the right-wing market (the more affluent, more southerly portion of it) and is parking his tanks accordingly; his defence of private schools has been at least as full-throated as the Conservatives, if not more so.

The accumulating weight of the strategic disaster unfolding for the party is doing nothing to make leadership speculation less febrile, to put it mildly. At present, the widespread assumption seems to be that any move against Badenoch will come in the aftermath of next year’s local elections.

But the odds of it happening before then must be shortening. Why, her critics ask, does the party need to lose hundreds more councillors, to say nothing of its positions in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, to confirm something it already knows?