Just how bad are the opinion polls for Keir Starmer?

Boris Johnson is enjoying a ‘vaccine bounce’ in the popularity stakes, but, says John Rentoul, it is unlikely to last

Keir Starmer: the British public has not yet decided what to make of him (Getty Images)

Two new opinion polls yesterday, from Opinium and Deltapoll, put the Conservatives nine percentage points ahead of Labour, by 45 per cent to 36 per cent. This suggests that Keir Starmer has made some progress since Jeremy Corbyn recorded the worst defeat for Labour since 1935, but not much.

Indeed, because the constituency boundaries are likely to be redrawn by the time of the next election, removing the bias in the system that benefited Labour last time, a nine-point Tory lead would probably result in another majority of about 80 seats for the government.

However, the picture is not necessarily as gloomy as it seems for the leader of the opposition, who has just marked his first year in post. He told The Sunday Times in an interview published yesterday: “I said to the team in December, we’re going to see a vaccine bounce for the government. It’s an incredible feelgood factor.”

It seems likely that voters are giving the Conservative government some credit for the successful vaccination programme, which has been faster than in any other large country. A Savanta ComRes poll for The Independent confirms that public opinion is in favour of tough restrictions continuing for some time, and is worried that Boris Johnson will ease the lockdown too soon. Even so, the prime minister continues to bask in the warm glow of vaccine-induced approval.

That is reflected by Opinium’s finding that he leads Starmer by 38 per cent to 25 per cent when voters are asked which of them would be the better prime minister (22 per cent say neither, and 15 per cent don’t know).

This effect is going to wear off by the likely date of the next election, in 2023 or 2024, though. Hard as it may be to imagine it now, the pandemic is likely by then to be a fading memory and voters’ assessment of the government dominated by whatever the immediate concerns of the day will be.

A trawl through the detailed findings of recent polls suggests that, although Starmer’s personal ratings have slipped somewhat, he remains well placed to resume the onward march of Labour that has been temporarily halted by the vaccinations.

With both Opinium and Redfield & Wilton Strategies, Starmer’s approval rating remains positive, at plus two points; Johnson’s rating as prime minister is in effect the same at plus three points (Opinium).

Redfield & Wilton asked voters to compare Starmer with his four predecessors as Labour leader. It found that they thought he was, on balance, much better than Jeremy Corbyn (net 30 points “better”), better than Ed Miliband (11 points) and a bit better than Gordon Brown (5 points), while only a net 5 points “worse” than Tony Blair.

Given that Brown deprived the Conservatives of a majority in 2010 and Blair won three emphatic election victories, to be rated somewhere between the two is not bad.

Redfield & Wilton also asked whether voters agreed with the statement: “Keir Starmer looks like someone who will one day be prime minister.” Only 31 per cent agreed, as against 35 per cent who disagreed, but 27 per cent said they neither agreed nor disagreed and 8 per cent said they didn’t know.

My reading of these polls is that public opinion has not decided, as it did early on in the cases of Miliband and Corbyn, that this Labour leader doesn’t have what it takes to be prime minister. When the vaccine bounce subsides, Starmer will have plenty of scope to persuade the as yet unpersuaded.