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.