In his Parliament of Whores, PJ O’Rourke gave one section the stirring title “Our Government: What The F*** Do They Do All Day And Why Does It Cost So Goddamned Much Money?” But as my research confirmed in various ways, most voters do not see government primarily as an expensive nuisance.
Amidst generally woeful scores, the Conservatives still lead on terrorism and defence, and run Labour close on law and order, asylum, and – still – the economy.
The UK still a country prioritises freedom. But its citizens are far more deferential to the state than their American cousins – and the language of freedom is far less ideological and far more personal.
He has already won back large numbers of voters since he entered Number 10, and both the polls and the focus groups confirm that many more are prepared to wait longer before making up their minds.
Sceptics will make valid points about this finding but there are good reasons to accept the picture at face value. It has him taking 50 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 33 per cent.
As two thirds of people in Britain agreed, the monarchy might seem a strange system in this day and age, but it works.
Only one in ten 2019 Tories – let alone anyone else – expect an outright Conservative victory next time round. Such a sense of inevitability could prove the hardest political challenge of all.
Labour had a slightly higher mean likelihood voting score among voters as a whole than the Conservatives.
The only country that a majority of respondents believe is doing enough to help them is Britain.
Our polling suggests that the dissenters’ take on events is seen as deeply eccentric by Tory voters.
The latest wave of an in-depth tracker project shows that a long-term softening of public attitudes has continued during the pandemic.
Most obviously, this complicates their Net Zero strategy; you would have expected fiscal policy increasingly to have rebalanced towards green taxes.
The fall mirrors the slippage in the Conservative rating in the national opinion polls during the past fortnight.
If we impose yet more draconian prison sentences to win a political arms race, the burdens on the taxpayer will become unsustainable.
Time will tell, but my impression is the way the announcement was made – and, crucially, reported – means it’ll have a marginally negative impact overall.