How big is a 20 point opinion poll lead and what word should we use to describe it – insurmountable, commanding, or maybe flaky? Right now, 20 points is the average advantage Keir Starmer and Labour hold over Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives: 46 plays 26.
In Tony Blair’s case, such a lead proved more than sufficient to propel him to his first epic win over the Conservatives. For 20 points was roughly the size of the polling advantage he took into the 1997 election campaign (although he had enjoyed some much bigger leads prior to that). On election day itself, Labour only beat the Tories on vote share by 13 points, which was still sufficient to secure a landslide majority. Theresa May held 20 point leads over Jeremy Corbyn going into the 2017 election, yet only beat him by two points in the end and lost the Tory parliamentary majority.
And as the invaluable historic polling data base compiled by the Lib Dem activist Mark Pack reminds us, Neil Kinnock regularly chalked up 20 point leads over Margaret Thatcher through Spring 1990. Yet they soon evaporated when John Major replaced her and the Tories won the general election two years later.
So 20 points is not a slam dunk. While pollsters are generally pretty good at measuring the breadth of a polling gap, gauging its depth and resilience is much more an art than a science and that allows us political commentators to stick our oars in.
In 1997 it seemed obvious that Blair was headed for a big majority because he was such a consummate campaigner – someone who could locate the political erogenous zones of Tory-leaning ‘Middle England’ better than any Conservative politician of the time.
He reminded us of that this week with his advice that the British people should not be asked to do a ‘huge amount’ more for net zero, adding: ‘Whatever we do in Britain is not really going to impact climate change’. Statistics showing China’s carbon emissions running at 35 times ours and increasing all the time rather underlines his point.
Yet Starmer obviously lacks either the imagination or the bravery to have made such a point. He is still beholden to his tribe of metropolitan progressives for whom making further radical sacrifices to combat climate change is an article of faith.
Blair would never have got himself on the wrong side of the trans debate either, as Starmer did backing gender self-ID and his view that it is ‘wrong’ to say that only a woman can have a cervix. Compare that to Blair’s advice to Labour in November 2021: ‘We should…emphatically reject the ‘wokeism’ of a small, though vocal, minority.’ This month, Keir Starmer finally abandoned self-ID, but climbed onto the fence over what should happen when trans rights and women’s rights come into conflict.
One can hardly envisage Blair handling the Nigel Farage banking furore as ineptly as has Starmer’s Labour either. Once Farage had obtained that devastating Coutts report revealing he was to be cancelled because of his ‘publicly-stated views’, Blair would have anticipated the ensuing public outrage rather than being caught cold by it. And Blair was so keenly aware of hardline public attitudes to illegal immigration that he proposed setting up an offshore processing camp in Africa as long ago as 2004. Yet Team Starmer insists such a thing is, in the words of shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper: ‘Unworkable, shameful and desperate.’
All of these instincts and stances explain why Blair’s 20 point lead was of a very different character to Starmer’s. He had bomb-proofed it against collapse by creating a foundational attachment between himself and the Mondeo men and Worcester women whose swing votes were always going to settle the election.
There are not many Mondeos still on the road, but those driving that saloon’s modern-day successors have been picking up an inkling that the Labour party is not on their side, as shown not only in the surprise Tory hold at the Uxbridge parliamentary by-election but also by an even more surprising Tory gain in a council by-election in Cambridge a few weeks earlier.
Rishi Sunak has gone on the attack today over Labour’s ‘war on the motorist’, highlighting onerous policies being implemented where the opposition party is in power in London and Wales. Earlier in the week he accused Labour of being on the same side as people-trafficking gangs when it comes to illegal immigration. Meanwhile his defeat of the Scottish government over trans militancy proved that a socially conservative backbone lurks within his frame.
If the cost-of-living crisis fails to abate and rises in home-loan repayments continue to cripple Labour’s new target demographic of ‘middle-aged mortgage man’, then Starmer’s current poll lead can get him over the line. But he has neglected to insure it against the possibility of a better economic outlook and has failed to convince swing voters that he shares their values. As a result, his 20-point cushion is overinflated and vulnerable either to a slow puncture or a high-impact blow-out during the election campaign.
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