14 Dec 2011

Voters turn their back on Miliband

Painful outing for Ed Miliband in PMQ’s after a strong performance in Monday’s European Summit statement. He’ll be feeling it. I’m told he comes back to his office all too aware of having failed on occasions like this.


Friends reported he went into something of a slump in May/June last year, only to be revived by his own attack on News International. That gave him a bit of a fillip in his own personal poll ratings, but if you look at the numbers you see that was thanks to Labour supporters who’d grown dissatisfied with him changing their mind.

It wasn’t due to converts from other parties or “don’t knows” coming over to him. Anyway, it has evaporated.

You can see that in the Ipsos MORI figures for Ed Miliband’s ratings with people who express support for the Labour Party below. If dissatisfaction continued to rise at this rate and satisfaction continued to fall at this rate then Ed Miliband would be in negative rating amongst supporters of his own party by the Spring of next year.

That, a Tory strategist tells me, is when a party’s day-to-day politics get absorbed with propping up the leader, relaunches and internal struggles and the bigger political battle gets neglected. And after 18 years in the wilderness, the Tories should know all about that.

Here also is Ipsos MORI’s presentation of how Ed Miliband’s general net satisfaction ratings with all voters compare with other opposition leaders, month for month, starting with the first month of their respective election to the leadership of their party.

Ed Miliband’s team may take comfort from seeing that David Cameron had a net satisfaction slump just before the election Gordon Brown didn’t call in 2007 which went lower than Ed M’s current net satisfaction ratings.

But what really strikes you in these graphs, which are up to date with the latest December results, is the close similarity between Ed Miliband’s progress with the voters since taking over as Leader of the Opposition and Michael Howard’s.



To rub salt in the wounds David Cameron just told his MPs in the 1922 Committee that he hoped Labour didn’t take him seriously when he asked them to get rid of their leader for Christmas. He also said that if you’d asked him a year ago if he would be standing in front of them having removed Gaddafi, won seats in the council elections, ahead of Labour in the polls, he’d have said you were mad. Bill Cash unusually read the mood of the room and asked him to be alert to those who would like to unravel what happened in Brussels. Nobody tried to pin him down on repatriation of powers or referenda.

A danger for the PM is that the divisions on Europe which lurk will break out in 2012. The PM told MPs he will give a foreign affairs speech in January which he hopes will help to bind everyone in. He also reminded Tory MPs making eyes at the DUP as alternative Coalition allies and the polls as a moment for an early election that they were in bed with the Lib Dems til 2015 and had to keep the Coalition “in good working order” all the way to that finishing post.

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