The Tories are back over 40% in the latest ConservativeHome Poll of Polls. All thanks to an ICM survey for tomorrow's News of the World (not yet online). The Tories are up 4% to 41% (compared to the most recent ICM poll) and Labour are down one point to 30% and the LibDems have fallen back below 20%, by 2% to 19%. ComRes, YouGov, MORI and now ICM all have the Conservatives at 40% or more. We'll see if Populus echo the trend in the next few days.
We still have the question mark in the graphic above as we await the outcome of the race to succeed Menzies Campbell (for a laugh btw watch this Rory Bremner sketch taking off Ming's resignation). If a YouGov survey is to be believed that yellow box will be filled by the smiling face of Nick Clegg. According to PoliticalBetting Nick Clegg has a 56% to 44% lead over Chris Huhne among those LibDem members who've already cast their ballots. That's a thinner margin than expected and confirmation, perhaps, of the effect of Huhne's vigorous campaign. With half of those sampled by YouGov still to vote, Clegg cannot take victory for granted, however.
The interim leader that Clegg and Huhne will succeed - who stole PMQs this week with that Mr Bean joke, Vince Cable, pens a devasting critique of Gordon Brown for tomorrow's Mail on Sunday:
"He has a belief in the secular equivalent of papal infallibility: a near-religious faith in the capacity of central government and its army of civil servants to improve our lives and never make mistakes. When Gordon Brown quotes the sage of Kirkcaldy, Adam Smith, Smith must be turning in his grave. Smith was Britain's – perhaps the world's – greatest economist who understood two centuries ago the perils of big government. He was particularly contemptuous of cosy relationships between business and governments, supposedly working together in the national interest. He would have a wry smile for the queues of Government-dependent PFI contractors, defence manufacturers, nuclear-power and airport lobbyists passing through the revolving doors of Downing Street in the Brown-Blair years. No one who has ever been involved in the management of large organisations would have such a naive belief in the capacity of government targets, directions, protocols and regulations to change behaviour for the better. In practice, when things go wrong, they go terribly wrong. The Government's belief that the recent loss of 25million records was some random, isolated, low-level event without wider significance sums up Gordon Brown's myopic but over-ambitious approach to government. In fact, numerous costly errors arising from over-centralisation have been made in Gordon Brown's Treasury from day one. But they were forgiven and forgotten in the warm glow of national prosperity. Badly thought-out, impractical schemes such as Individual Learning Accounts and Film Tax Credits were started and abandoned at the cost of hundreds of millions."
Mr Brown will be more worried, however, by remarks by Alan Milburn in The Sunday Times. Up until now the Blairites have been pretty loyal but Milburn, freshly returned from Kevin Rudd's victory in Australia, writes that "Howard lost because he ran out of ideas and got out of touch." Milburn continues: "[John Howard] thought he could overcome 'time for change' by relying on the strength of the economy but he couldn't come up with a compelling agenda for the future." The only way Milburn could have been clearer as to the target for his message was if he'd substituted "vision" for "agenda" in that final sentence.
Gordon Brown's government is characterized by its complete lack of a sense of direction. The first public sign of this was the presentation of re-vamped old ideas on housing being presented as new fare. The re-vamped ideas kept coming and only last week we had the same old plans for re-training the jobless. Plans that we know will not come to fruition. There is only one thing worse than a broken promise and thats a re-heated broken promise. This Labour government is completely bereft of any original thinking. It is burnt-out. Running on empty. It has no vision for the future and represents no future for the country.
Posted by: Tony Makara | December 01, 2007 at 21:10
"ComRes, YouGov, MORI and now ICM all have the Conservatives at 40% or more. We'll see if Populus echo the trend in the next few days."
Unfortunately Populus is the most Labour-friendly pollster of all - the mirror image of ComRes -they put Labour 1% ahead only a month ago. I wouldn't bank on it, but it will be interesting all the same. It would be a shame if other polling organisations don't carry out a survey as we speak - they're mostly dating back to last weekend.
Anyway, this is another encouraging poll. Labour on just 30% now! I wonder how much lower they will go. They may even be pushed into third place at some point in the next year.
Posted by: Votedave | December 01, 2007 at 21:10
The Milburn intervention is significant. Labour MPs are much slower to be disloyal than Tories. This isn't very coded.
Posted by: Alan S | December 01, 2007 at 21:14
The donargate scandal extends into new territory tonight. The Daily Mail have a report into donations of £830,000 in the past eight months received by Labour, from Iranian-born car dealer Mahmoud Khayami.
Posted by: Daily Referendum | December 01, 2007 at 21:27
Alan S, yes, Gordon Brown has clearly lost the dressing room. There will be people in the Labour party who now see that Gordon Brown cannot win the next election. Can they remove him though or even force a resignation?
If enough people in the Labour party have the courage to be critical of Brown that pressure may be enough. If Brown is to be dethroned it has to be soon. However my feeling is that there are certain players in the Labour party who would be happy to lose the next election as it would give them an opportunity to advance their own position within the party.
Posted by: Tony Makara | December 01, 2007 at 21:30
Poll Trivia:
Brown only needs to drop 2 more points to take Labour to depths they have not reached since before 1987 in an ICM poll. They have returned to the levels of the Blair Government at its least popularity.
Conservatives have equalled their biggest lead (one poll last April) in an ICM poll since May 1992. 41% is also their equal highest rating (one poll last March) since 1992.
Posted by: John Leonard | December 01, 2007 at 22:21
The Big Mo! (for anyone who has ever watched the West Wing!) Question: Polls looking good and I remember thinking when we were -11 in the polls that we "need a good scandal" to bring Brown down a peg or two and boy have we had them. BUT, what do we do no to keep the Big Mo, that is momentum, going? When this starts to die down we need a big policy announcement on the scale of IHT to once again sieze the iniative.... Thoughts?
Posted by: Nick | December 01, 2007 at 23:59
Well jingle my jangles, it certainly is Christmas if you're a Tory.
Hitting the 40% mark now should be taken as read - the minimum expected. What is more interesting is the Labour vote, just hovering above the twenties now.
It's not so much the Big Mo for us, rather the big Heave-ho for Brown and his desperate party. Lets turn a negative Labour vote into a true positive Tory vote by rising above the current fray and continue to churn out new ideas like Gove and Herbert have been doing, so that the people of Britain can see which party is ready to govern again.
Posted by: Edison Smith | December 02, 2007 at 00:55
What plausible alternative do they have to Brown? Answer: no one, nor does the power structure within Labour lend itself to Tory-like leadership challenges.
The only way for Labour to get rid of Brown once and for all is by having him lose the next general election. And thus it will be. He is going to hang around for quite some time.
Posted by: Goldie | December 02, 2007 at 04:15
Milburn's comparison with Australia stirs the pot, but the main reason the Libs lost in Oz was not particularly a lack of ideas - Rudd was accused of a lot of me-twoism - but instead disloyalty from Costello and more importantly, longevity.
The Australian electorate simply called time after a decade f Liberal government.
You can see the the inescapable parallels. It'll take more than 'ideas' to get Labour's squidgy bits out of the fire.
Posted by: Old Hack | December 02, 2007 at 09:50
A superb article from Vince Cable -- he really ought to be the Conservative Party. For that matter the Conservative Party needs to start showing some anti-establishment mettle as our editor says.
Posted by: Erasmus | December 02, 2007 at 11:46
We are 11% ahead and would get a majority of 29. Labour got a majority of 60 when only 3% ahead. Is it good enough to shrug our shoulders and more or less say "that's life". Shouldn't we be yelling foul? And how about asking how it has come to this and, perhaps. wondering what influence the government has had on this perversion of democracy of which Mr Putin would be proud?
Posted by: David Sergeant | December 02, 2007 at 17:55
The majority would depend on Tactical Voting and the distribution of the vote in the main; The 2 main parties have both benefited since 1918 from the First Past the Post system, at the turn of the century the Liberal Party benefited winning a landslide on not actually that high a vote. In 1951 the Conservatives benefited winning a majority on 48% when Labour got 48.8% of the Popular Vote.
In 1974 certainly Labour benefited, with a different distribution the Conservatives could have won an overall majority.
If the above poll actually was the national figures for the next General Election then that could mean anything between a Hung Parliament with the Conservative Party the largest party, and a Conservative majority of over 100. Labour could have anything between 180 seats and 280 seats.
If the national figures for the last General Election repeated, but the Liberal Democrat vote concentrated, then the Liberal Democrats could end up gaining 30 seats and Labour might lose it's majority.
One way around this problem would be a kind of one party exective on a multi-member single constituency STV system - allow candidates to be entered any number of times - the condition being that each entry on the list should have 100 candidates, parties could then present the public with alternative options including one party government (possibly all one party or a mixture of members) and coalition. The condition being that each grouping entered on the list pay a £100,000 deposit.
If no grouping got 50%+ of the 1st preferences then preferences would be re-arranged until one grouping got 50%. The distribution of the vote would then be irrelevant to the final result and the 1st grouping would then form the executive. There could then be a couple of hundred MPs elected on an STV system using seperate constituencies (possibly some multi-member to allow for larger electorate sizes of rural constituencies). The executive then would rule with 2/3 of MPs voting against the executive needed to pass legislation against the wishes of the executive or block the executive from passing legislation.
Banning Trade Union donations to political parties and banning convicts and ex-convicts from voting could help reduce the Labour vote, I think it also desirable to ban corporate donations as in many cases small shareholders do not agree with how the company's money is spent, this would leave uncapped private donations only.
Posted by: Yet Another Anon | December 06, 2007 at 21:03