Dissatisfied Tories Pose Problem For Duncan Smith - And Themselves
This has not been a good week for the Conservative Party at Westminster. And the results from our polling across the country will also be cause for concern for the party. For the first time, more Conservatives are dissatisfied than satisfied with the way Iain Duncan Smith is doing his job as party leader, according to the MORI Political Monitor survey for October.
The survey, the first since the conference speech which was touted as the most important of Mr Duncan Smith's career, and which was considered a success by many commentators, found that only 32% of those who say they would vote Conservative were satisfied with Mr Duncan Smith's performance, while 39% were dissatisfied, a net score of -7. Among the whole public just 18% are satisfied and 44% dissatisfied, also the worst figures of his year-long leadership. Perhaps particularly telling is how bad his score is among the key age groups that must be the bedrocks of Tory recovery: just 12% of 55-64 year olds and 13% of 45-54 year olds are satisfied with Mr Duncan Smith's leadership; 57% and 56% respectively are dissatisfied.
Mr Duncan Smith also faces issues about his profile. Almost as striking is that 38% still have no opinion whether he is doing a good job or not, the highest figure MORI has ever measured for a Leader of the Opposition at this point in his career. This rises to 48% among 18-34 year olds, and 54% among 18-24 year olds.
It is really the anonymity more than the unpopularity that appears to be the root problem: his failure to make an impression on the public prevents him from having any chance of putting his policies across to the public. At the moment the Conservatives are not taken seriously as an alternative government, and this is giving Labour a free ride. With the public disillusioned with party politics and taking little interest in political issues, it will surely take a conspicuous and out-of-the-ordinary event to break the vicious cycle.
The present stagnation is well depicted in research released yesterday by the Independent Television Commission and Broadcasting Standards Council. Almost two-thirds of the public, 65%, cited television as their main source of news, compared to 15% who rely more on newspapers and 16% on radio. More than 60% feel politicians get too much coverage in the news. Only 16% of viewers now say they are regular watchers of current affairs programmes.
Of course, it is not only Mr Duncan Smith who is suffering from this public reaction. As I discussed in this column a few weeks ago [Trusting The Politicians], politicians in general have a "trust" problem these days - the ITC/BSC poll confirms this, finding that while 43% of the public say they trust Sir Trevor McDonald "a great deal", only 7% say the same of Tony Blair - fewer than have a great deal of trust in Cilla Black (8%), David Beckham (9%) and, topically, Ian Hislop (11%).
(Nevertheless, the position is not quite as bad as yesterday's reporting of the poll in the Evening Standard suggested, which opened by stating that "Tony Blair is trusted by only marginally more TV viewers than the fictional character Ali G", continuing by noting that Blair's score was "only six percentage points higher" than Ali G's. The difference between 7% and 1% is quite a substantial one!)
More broadly, there is none of the public enthusiasm for Tony Blair that seemed to be there when he was first elected. The MORI Delivery Index polls consistently uncover widespread scepticism that he will be able to keep his promises on public services. His own and his government's satisfaction ratings, while not spectacularly bad, are nothing to write home about. The Prime Minister's net satisfaction rating in this month's MORI Political Monitor is -8: 41% are satisfied with the way he is doing his job as Prime Minister, 49% dissatisfied - figures which have changed little in the last few months. Satisfaction with the way the government is running the country is only 35%.
But at the moment Tony Blair benefits from the status quo; it is Iain Duncan Smith who has to find some way to break the mould. In his first year of leadership, he has given no indications that he is able to do so, and he clearly lacks the backing of his party rank-and-file, to say nothing of his voters.
It is not that his ratings at this stage are uniquely bad, but they do not point to encouraging precedents. William Hague at the same stage of his leadership as Duncan Smith is now (July 1998) had 35% of Tories satisfied and 50% dissatisfied (net -15). However, in October 1998, after that year's conference, 51% were satisfied with Hague and 38% dissatisfied (+13). This year's conference was similarly supposed to be "make or break" for IDS. Is it going to be break? For the conference, through its lack of public impact, illustrated his problem. The "quiet man" persona, so far removed from what many of the public despise in politicians, might in principle be a real vote-winner; but it becomes self-defeating if the result is that the public never become aware of it.
Common sense suggests that under the leadership rules introduced by Hague, Duncan Smith must be safe for the moment if he sticks to his determination, announced yesterday, not to resign the leadership under any circumstances. For a leadership challenge, it now requires 15% of the parliamentary party - currently 25 MPs - to sign what is effectively an open letter demanding a vote of no confidence; both personally for the MPs involved, and collectively for the party, this may amount to political suicide.
At the very least, one might expect nothing to happen until after next year's local elections, when Duncan Smith faces the difficult but not impossible task of improving on the results from Hague's high-tide point*. But by then, the next general election may be only two years off.
There seems no shortage of Tory MPs who are already either openly discontented with Mr Duncan Smith's leadership or so widely named as plotting against him that they would hardly be worse off by publicly admitting it. The leader's open accusation of four MPs as being ringleaders will hardly improve matters. And with 27 Conservative MPs sitting on majorities of 7% or less and perhaps beginning to fear that the incredible might happen and further inroads will be made into the Conservative vote share at the next election, perhaps there could soon be others who feel they have nothing to lose by calling for a leadership election.
Yet in sober truth a new leadership would be unlikely to help. A bitter no confidence fight that Duncan Smith had won would leave him a hopelessly lame-duck leader for the rest of the Parliament. If he were to lose (and therefore be banned from running in the new leadership contest), or for that matter if he were to resign, does anybody really doubt that the bad blood, so evidently underlying everything that has happened in and around Smith Square in recent years, will not break out into the open again. The factionalism in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party is not fundamentally pro- and anti- Duncan Smith, and his removal would not stop it, but merely provide it with a new battleground. Any post Duncan Smith leadership election, far from being a unifying event, would surely be very bloody indeed.
The bottom line is that the Tories give the impression of hating each other far more than they hate the government. That state of affairs may well be true in all political parties far more often than the outsider might suppose; but it is the impression rather than the reality that has political impact, and the continuing image of the Tories as constantly and bitterly divided is one of the major obstacles to the election of another Conservative government. Perhaps Iain Duncan Smith was the wrong choice as leader, but even if that is so, changing horses at this stage is probably no solution.
* Thanks to one of our readers for pointing out that this phrase reads a little ambiguously and consequently misleadingly. The 1999 local elections were not William Hague's "high-tide point"; in terms of equivalent national vote share lead over Labour, the Conservatives did much better in 2000 than in 1999. However, the point I meant to make was that for a credible performance next May, Mr Duncan Smith has to be seen to be doing better than Hague ever did, given the eventual general election outcome of Hague's leadership. Even a few gains, improving on 1999, won't be enough if the party is seen as having moved backward in overall strength since Hague was leader. RM.
