The question is why isn’t Labour 20 points ahead in the opinion polls?

Only 4 per cent of voters think the prime minister has done a good job in handling coronavirus, writes John Rentoul, but that does not mean the rest are ready to vote Labour

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer squaring off at Prime Minister’s Questions (Reuters TV)

The question, “Why isn’t Labour 20 points ahead?” is one of the last Corbynite memes on social media. Any comment about how well Keir Starmer is doing is liable to generate responses from Momentum trolls demanding to know why he isn’t doing even better in the opinion polls. 

This is a reference to a common criticism of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership from the other wing of the party, suggesting that Theresa May and then Boris Johnson were making such a mess of things that, under any other leader, Labour would be 20 points ahead of the Conservatives. 

Like most Corbynite memes, it is nonsense. For many years the prize exhibit, if you really wanted to make a fool of yourself online, was to claim that Tony Blair “lost 4 million votes” for Labour. In other words, pointing out that Blair won so many votes in 1997 he could afford to lose 4 million of them and still win an emphatic majority in 2005. 

But, like other Corbynite myths, it has a superficial plausibility while seeking out a psychological weakness among Labour supporters. There are many of them who accept that Corbyn’s time has gone, and that Starmer is doing a good job, who still wonder why Labour isn’t doing better in the polls. 

After all, for Labour partisans it is obvious that the prime minister’s handling of coronavirus has been disastrous – so there must be something wrong with Starmer’s leadership that Labour and the Conservatives are only level pegging in the opinion polls, usually with the Tories a few points ahead. 

Unfortunately for the Labour Party, however, Twitter is not the real world, and what is obvious to people who cannot stand Boris Johnson is not necessarily obvious to the rest of the country. True, only 4 per cent of people think the prime minister has “done a good job, making the right decisions to tackle the pandemic”, according to a YouGov poll published today. 

But the rest of the population is split down the middle: half (46 per cent) think he has “made mistakes, but has done as well as he reasonably could have done”, while the other half (45 per cent) think he has done a “bad job”. 

Crucially, when YouGov asked people to imagine Keir Starmer and the Labour Party were in government, only a quarter (26 per cent) thought fewer people would be catching the virus; half thought it would be “about the same” (35 per cent), or more (15 per cent); while a further quarter were “not sure” (25 per cent). People were also more likely to think that the effect on the economy would be worse rather than better. 

The objective view may be that Starmer has made a huge difference to Labour’s standing, mainly by not being Corbyn, but also by projecting an impression of basic competence and clear decision-making. The main decision he has made that people outside the political bubble will have noticed was his call for a temporary lockdown, which was in tune with public opinion and which is likely to appear to be vindicated by the rising curve of infections. 

This has allowed Starmer to close the 20-point deficit in the polls that he inherited from Corbyn, but the Labour Party is up against a formidable opponent. Not just Johnson, who, despite being about as unpopular as governing politicians normally are, is an election winner, and is given the benefit of the doubt by a large section of the electorate; but Labour is also up against its own recent record of sectarian lack of seriousness, which will be readvertised in tomorrow’s report on Corbyn’s inept handling of antisemitism. 

The fundamental reason that Labour isn’t 20 points ahead in the polls is that, although half the voters think Boris Johnson has handled the current crisis badly, not enough people are yet convinced that Keir Starmer and his Labour team would be significantly better.