11 Apr 2018

Trial Reconciliation. May now looks much stronger than Corbyn or Johnson in public standing

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A week today will be the first anniversary of Theresa May’s surprise decision to seek an early general election. It will thus be accompanied by a real orgy of commentary about how this proved to be the most dire miscalculation since (fill in your preferred option here, there will be plenty offered by the media) along with some reflection about her present political condition. To save hard pressed members of the private equity and venture capital industry time, BVCA Insight will provide a short and snappy analysis seven days early.

The essence of this argument is that the miscalculation made in April 2017 was not the principle of heading for the hustings well advance of May 2020 (the then legal deadline). Indeed the complexities of Brexit meant that moving the final date of the Parliament back to 2022 did then and does now have a lot to commend it. The Prime Minister should have come to this view about four weeks earlier. That would have enabled her to hold the poll alongside the multiple local elections that occurred on 4 May 2017. If she had done so, we can predict with confidence what the result would have been, because we know what did happen in the various ballots for the new metropolitan mayors on that early May date: the Conservatives won by a very substantial margin.

If this looks like a case of being wise after the event, then Insight would cite in its defence the edition that ran on 7 June 2017 which asserted that if the result fell short of Conservative expectations, the choice of date and not the character of the campaign would have been the decisive factor. The long contest made it harder for the election to be, as the Prime Minister wanted, a de facto referendum on her Brexit strategy and allowed it to become, as Jeremy Corbyn sought, a strange form of giant by-election in which voters felt that they could give a government a kicking without consequences.

As for the Prime Minister’s current status, this too can be summarised succinctly. Mrs May, having moved from an unusually deep political honeymoon period among the electorate between July 2016 and May 2017 to a sudden and brutal trial separation and the very edge of divorce from the same voters thereafter, today appears to have recovered to the degree that it can be seen as a trial reconciliation and might even be close to the stage where she is more likely than not to stay in her office to 2022.

An awful lot of metaphorical water has got to flow under the proverbial bridge before then. But to demonstrate her resilience, some data from a new polling firm called Delta that was published on Sunday in The Observer is instructive. Delta, being a fresh entrant to this market, does not have the legacy issues which much of the battered British opinion polling industry has been associated with. The aspect of their survey that their sponsor newspaper chose to place its emphasis on was the finding that 51% of all voters, including a sizeable minority of Labour supporters, believed that both the party and its leader has a significant problem with anti-Semitism. That is an important finding to be sure, but the focus for BVCA Insight will be on the other lines of questioning which concentrated on the relative standing of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the potential Leader of the internal Opposition (Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary). The findings here make for exceptionally interesting reading.

The Prime Minister is much less unpopular than either Mr Corbyn or Mr Johnson

When asked whether Mrs May was performing very well, quite well, quite badly or very badly, the public responded as follows. Some 8% said very well, 34% quite well, 25% quite badly, 23% very badly with 10% not registering an opinion. That is an overall figure for ‘approval’ of minus six points, well below her peaks but clearly above her post-election troughs as well. It is a decent rate for an incumbent Prime Minister.

By contrast, Mr Corbyn’s numbers for the same question was 7% very well, 23% quite well, 25% quite badly, 32% very badly with 13% unable to express themselves. This is a net ‘approval’ tally of minus 27 points, quite a margin behind the Prime Minister. When asked their opinion of Mr Johnson, the overall numbers are strikingly similarly to Mr Corbyn. Again 7% chose very well, 21% quite well, 22% quite badly, 32% very badly and 18% said ’don’t know’.

What lies behind these numbers? There are two elements at work. The first is how their own party supporters see these three individuals. Mrs May has a net approval ranking of plus 56% among those who identify with the Conservatives. Mr Corbyn has a far more modest advantage of plus 25% within those intending to vote Labour, with a third of his own party associates hostile to his leadership. The Foreign Secretary has a net approval rating of only plus 10% among the Conservative slice of voters.

The second aspect is the split between those who voted Remain and Leave in 2016. Mrs May has managed to recover her status among the Leave section of the electorate. She has a net approval rating here of plus 18 points whereas Mr Corbyn comes in at minus 55 points. Mr Johnson, despite being the de facto leader of the Leave cause, ranks at minus one point among these citizens now.

The Remain segment breaks very differently. It has Mr Corbyn out front (but not massively) at an approval level of minus 7%. The PM comes next at minus 18%. Boris comes in at minus 53 points. It would seem that Mrs May retains the trust of Leave voters that she will deliver Brexit for them but Mr Corbyn’s attempt at ambiguity around the departure from the EU has stopped working for him.

Age continues to displace class as the most relevant factor in determining party affiliation

The extraordinary feature of the 2017 election was how weak class was in shaping the outcome and how strong age was instead (see BVCA Insight, 11 October 2017 for the full details). This still seems true despite the Prime Minister’s partial political recovery. In class terms there is a divide but it is not vast. She has a net approval of plus one point among ABC1s and minus 13 points among C2DEs. The division is more modest for Mr Corbyn at minus 29 points for the ABC1s and minus 24 points within the C2DEs. This is almost identical to Mr Johnson who is at minus 30% and minus 24% respectively.

The differences according to age are much more extreme. Those aged 18-24 have Mrs May at minus 34 points and Mr Corbyn at plus six points. Between 25-34 those numbers are minus 42 points and plus 13 points respectively (just as at the general election it is second, third and fourth time voters and not first time ones who are most alienated from the Conservative Party). The figure softens for Mrs May among those aged 35-54 as her approval number falls back to minus 13 points, although Mr Corbyn surges here to plus 29 points. It is then all change for those aged 55-64 as Mrs May rates at plus four points while her rival falls through the floor to minus 50 points in this section. Finally, there are those 65+. Here Mrs May racks up an approval score of plus 43 points (the old have manifestly forgotten about the ‘Dementia Tax’ idea) while Mr Corbyn is clobbered by a minus 57% rating. This is a huge spread.

Interestingly (I think anyway), age is not really relevant to Mr Johnson’s public position. Disapproval of him is far more even (-20% for those aged 18-24, -35% for 25-34, -30% for 35-54, -20% for 55-64 and -25% for 65+). Perhaps the young do not like him because of Brexit while older voters (who are so in favour of Mrs May) are wary of his periodic apparent displays of disloyalty towards his leader. Irrespective of that, this shift towards age rather than class-based voting is a seismic development.

The economy remains Labour’s area of maximum vulnerability

One final question to consider. The sample were asked who they would prefer to oversee the UK economy: Mrs May and Philp Hammond or Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell. The result was 42% for May/Hammond and 29% for Corbyn/McDonnell with 29% withholding any answer. That is a stark outcome (particularly at a moment when growth is more sluggish than stellar). In the end, this data might prove more decisive about the medium-term destination of British politics than anything else.

Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA


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