Tory lead!!

MORI's poll for the News of the World published yesterday and conducted on Thursday and Friday puts the Conservatives ahead of Labour, the first poll (by any company) to do so since sterling crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism eight years ago. The immediate reaction of the government's supporters would, no doubt, have been to dismiss it as a "rogue" and to try to ignore it, except that NOP's poll, also published yesterday in the Sunday Times, had very similar figures (disagreeing by only 1% on the both Conservative and Labour shares). There seem no doubt that what the two polls measured was real, a very sharp swing against the government - and, furthermore, a swing that took place almost entirely over a couple of days, for Gallup's poll in the Daily Telegraph last week, which had been interviewing up to Tuesday, found almost no sign of it.

The reason, of course, is obvious - the petrol crisis, and the political situation it caused. Some of the news of the past week - and the press coverage of it - has been highly evocative of the "Winter of Discontent", which not only brought down the last Labour government but was a potent image for Conservatives to argue against electing another one for years afterwards. Speculation that the fuel shortages might disrupt refuse collection and even funerals must have brought back to many older voters memories of the rubbish piled uncollected and the dead unburied in 1978-9. Gordon Brown, almost unbelievably (what were his spin doctors thinking of?) was even so foolish as to revive memories of a famous headline by quibbling over the use of the term "crisis". ("CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?", as Jim Callaghan never said but the Sun said for him.)

The public makes no bones about blaming the government for last week's events. In the MORI/News of the World poll, 85% blamed the government a great deal or a fair amount, 85% said the government should reduce the current level of petrol tax, and 82% thought that the protesters who blockaded the oil refineries were right to take direct action in this way. Overall, only 19% were satisfied with the way Mr Blair handled the issue while 79% were dissatisfied, a four-to-one margin. The figures were very similar to those found by NOP, and by ICM in a poll for the Daily Mail published on Saturday.

But it is important to remember that the swing in voting intention is clearly anti-government rather than pro-Conservative. That can be seen partly in the voting intention figures themselves, for a substantial part of the fall in Labour's support has switched not to the Tories but the Lib Dems, who were at 18% in MORI's poll and 21% in NOP's (their highest rating in any poll since July 1994 and not a bad omen to start their party conference!) - this despite the fact that the Lib Dems are the party most unequivocally in favour of high fuel taxes. But the same conclusion comes equally clearly from the continuing poor rating of William Hague: only 29% are satisfied with the way he is doing his job as Conservative leader and 49% dissatisfied, only matching his figures in our regular monthly poll for the Times in July; he seems to have gained nothing from being on the popular side in the petrol dispute, and any support his party is gaining is presumably in spite of rather than because of his leadership. Meanwhile, though, the government's ratings have dropped precipitately: 28% satisfied with the way the government is running the country, 32% with the way Mr Blair is doing his job as Prime Minister and 63% dissatisfied - much his worst ever rating - while 55% are dissatisfied with the job Gordon Brown is doing as Chancellor, giving him a net rating of -21 (negative for the first time ever and down from +14 in July.)

We must also remember that the electoral system at the moment gives a big advantage to Labour, and they can expect to win more seats for any given percentage of the votes than the Conservatives would do. This means that even this weekend's poll figures are probably not nearly as bad as they look. If the NOP figures, with the parties level, were to happen in an election, on uniform swing Mr Blair would still have an overall majority. Even the Tory lead shown in MORI's figures would leave Labour much the largest party in a hung parliament.

So what does it mean in the long term? Probably very little. Labour's electoral strength remains sustained for the moment by reluctance to vote Conservative. The public lost its temper last week, but will probably recover. Indeed, hints of that are visible in the detail of our poll, for the Conservatives fell from a 5-point lead in the interviews we conducted on Thursday down to only a 1-point lead on Friday. (The sub-sample sizes, though, are too small to place much weight on this.) Probably, within a couple of weeks Labour's healthy lead will be restored. Nevertheless, the government should be sobered by the knowledge that this sort of sudden swing, however short-lived, is possible. Of course, it is "only a poll"; but it would be taking a big gamble to assume that under similar circumstances voters might not do the same thing in the privacy of the polling booths - or, which could be almost as bad, decide it is not worth voting at all. This was a crisis which apparently came out of the blue, and the government was plainly not ready for it; they should learn from that.