Last month, we saw an unhappy record broken in the history of the Cabinet League Table with 11 ministers in negative ratings. Well, turns out that record stood for only a month: this time it’s 12.
At the other end of the scale, Kemi Badenoch has returned to the top spot, from which she was briefly ousted last month by Penny Mordaunt. These two, along with Johnny Mercer, have been swapping places on the podium for five months; the last time anyone else broke into the top three was in our October survey, when James Cleverly topped the poll.
That result is also a good indicator of how much air has gone out of the Government over the past half a year – and that from a low base. Even then, after all, there were six ministers in negative ratings, and Rishi Sunak’s positive score was in single digits.
But it was a least a positive score, and fully 35 points ahead of where he is today. And whilst the overall scores awarded by our panellists might have been well down on a couple of years ago, the two highest-ranked ministers (Cleverly and Badenoch) at least placed respectable scores in the +70s and +60s respectively.
This month, on the other hand, the Business Secretary’s gold-medal position was secured by a net-positive score of just 56; only Mercer and Mordaunt managed to post scores in the +40s. Contrast this with the situation a year ago, during the long hegemony of Ben Wallace: where 24.8 was enough to see Tom Tugendhat placed fourth this month, the exact same score in that poll earned Simon Hart only 17th place.
Few people are ever likely to have very strong opinions about everyone who attends a body so large as the modern Cabinet. The overall scores are, therefore, likely a useful barometer for our panel’s sentiments about the Government as a whole. Five months into the Prime Minister’s post-conference fightback, it’s looking as bleak as ever it has.