What The Public Thinks Of The Party Leaders (And The Leader-In-Waiting)

The public's detailed image of the Prime Minister has deteriorated significantly in the last 18 months, analysis of data from the Ipsos Political Monitor shows; but while Gordon Brown's image is better, it shares many of the most negative characteristics of Mr Blair's. The poll, conducted at the start of September (before the recent public falling out over the Prime Minister's retirement date) finds that Mr Brown, like Mr Blair, is primarily seen as out of touch, though the public also admit that he has sound judgment, a description they are reluctant to apply to Tony Blair, and many more people describe him as inflexible, tending to talk down to people and narrow minded than have the same impression of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders.

This does not necessarily mean that these impressions are based on anything concrete, or that they might not easily be changed once Mr Brown becomes Prime Minister -- if, of course, he does. It is quite likely that the public, lacking a strong impression of Mr Brown's own virtues and weaknesses, are to some extent unconsciously projecting their image of Mr Blair onto his putative successor. But it does mean that Mr Brown, rather than starting with a completely clean slate, or striking only positive associations from his years of perceived success overseeing the economy, may have to overcome some initially negative preconceptions among the voters if he is to persuade them to let him take Labour into a fourth term of office. Meanwhile, David Cameron and even more so Sir Menzies Campbell are less familiar figures to the public, and have yet to make quite as much impression on the public as Mr Brown or their own predecessors as leader.

These conclusions are drawn from the survey we conducted round the first weekend in September, when we asked our detailed bank of leader image questions for the first time since last year's general election. This gives us our first glimpse of how the public views David Cameron and Menzies Campbell; and, as a bonus, we also checked up on the image of Gordon Brown. Fieldwork for the survey began on 31 August, and although the last few interviews were on 6 September, the vast majority were completed before the publication of the letter from some Labour MPs demanding the Prime Minister's resignation and the leadership row which followed, so that can have had little if any impact on the results.

In the leader image survey, we present respondents with a written list of descriptions or attributes which might be applied to a politician, and ask them to select from it as few or as many as they feel fit each of the leaders. The list includes 14 descriptions, nine of which are broadly positive ones and five negative.

It is important to understand that we are not asking the respondent for an explicit "yes" or "no" on each description. The two methods, though apparently measuring the same thing, do not achieve comparable results; using the showcard list method, respondents tend to select fewer attributes as applying. When 25% tell us that they think Tony Blair is a "capable leader", it does not follow that the other 75% believe that he is not. The particular advantage of the showcard method is that it does not encourage respondents to overplay their weak impressions. With a yes-no format, they can feel compelled to decide one way or the other even if their opinions are very lightly held; but this probably bears little relation to the relevance of those views in their overall picture of the man. Using the showcard, if they have no strong impression of whether or not, say, Menzies Campbell is good in a crisis, they will not choose it from the list. Therefore we record not faint or grudging impressions of the leaders, but those which seem sufficiently clear to be worth mentioning; these should, we hope, be the same impressions most likely to affect respondents' overall views of the leaders and, perhaps, their voting behaviour.

The most frequently voiced opinion of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is that they are "out of touch with ordinary people", while David Cameron is most widely characterised as "rather inexperienced" and Menzies Campbell as "more honest than most politicians". But while only one in ten of the public say they have no opinion at all of which descriptions fit Tony Blair, more than a quarter chose to apply no descriptions to Gordon Brown, a third to David Cameron and over half to Menzies Campbell.

Q Here is a list of things both favourable and unfavourable that have been said about various politicians. I would like you to pick out all those statements that you feel fit [Tony Blair / David Cameron / Sir Menzies Campbell / Gordon Brown].

Base: 988 British adults 18+, 31 August-6 September 2006

This means it may be a little misleading to compare percentages directly -- with so many more people having an opinion of Tony Blair than of the other three, both his positive and negative ratings could be substantially higher without it meaning that his image differs from that of his rivals except in its intensity. One simple test, though is to average the positive and negative scores of each leader, and subtract one from the other. This shows Tony Blair as having clearly the worst image index, -9.5, while Campbell's is marginally the best and just positive, with Gordon Brown and David Cameron breaking almost exactly even.

Comparison of the findings for Tony Blair with our previous poll, conducted in the run-up to last year's election, shows the damage that the last 18 months have done to the Prime Minister's image. The number thinking he is a capable leader has fallen by a quarter, while half-as-many-again as felt then that he was out of touch think that he is now. Overall, his rating index has slipped from -0.5 to -9.5.

Q Here is a list of things both favourable and unfavourable that have been said about various politicians. I would like you to pick out all those statements that you feel fit Mr Blair.

Source: Ipsos / FT (2005) / Observer (2006)

Base: c. 1,000 GB residents aged 18+ in each survey

On the other side of the Commons, both David Cameron and Menzies Campbell have yet to make as strong an impression as their predecessors, as would perhaps be expected well under a year into their time as leaders. However, what impression David Cameron has made leaves him far less negatively viewed than was Michael Howard, and he may well move into positive territory once he is able to cast off the stigma of being inexperienced -- if it really is a stigma these days, with politicians in general being so unpopular that not being identified with the existing establishment may be an advantage.

Q Here is a list of things both favourable and unfavourable that have been said about various politicians. I would like you to pick out all those statements that you feel fit Mr Howard / Mr Cameron.

Source: Ipsos / FT (2005) / Observer (2006)

Base: c. 1,000 GB residents aged 18+ in each survey

Ming Campbell, by contrast, is not widely viewed as inexperienced -- which the public still felt was true of Charles Kennedy after years in the job -- but nor are as many yet convinced that he has all the positive virtues they associated with Mr Kennedy. Most notably, three times as many saw Kennedy as down-to-earth as now say the same of Campbell. Consequently, though positive, Campbell's index is a little lower than Kennedy's was.

Q Here is a list of things both favourable and unfavourable that have been said about various politicians. I would like you to pick out all those statements that you feel fit Mr Kennedy / Sir Menzies Campbell.

Source: Ipsos / FT (2005) / Observer (2006)

Base: c. 1,000 GB residents aged 18+ in each survey

With some leaders so much better known than others, it should be clear that interpreting this complex data set and making useful comparisons is no trivial matter. Fortunately, there is a statistical technique, correspondence analysis, which addresses precisely these difficulties and will help us make sense of it by reducing the data to a more easily comprehensible and accessible visual format, a "perceptual map".

Conceptually, a perceptual map is a diagram of "image space" based on differences between perceptions of the leaders, deriving the underlying influences which are shaping the opinions and enabling us to represent the opinions graphically in two dimensions. It is a picture of relative image -- how the leaders are viewed by comparison with each other, and to which leader particular characteristics are most distinctively seen as applying or not applying. It compensates for the fact that some of the leaders are better known than others, setting the overall prominence of each man at a similar level, so it is possible to see what particularly stands out in his image.

Broadly speaking, the nearer to an attribute that a leader is plotted on the map, the more strongly that attribute is perceived to apply to him (relative to the others), and vice-versa. [See footnote] Here is the perceptual map comparing the image of the three current leaders. Ellipses have been added round each of the leaders to aid visual comparison.

The perceptual map shows how the main distinction between the leaders in the public mind, expressed by the left-right dimension (the x-axis), is the difference between Tony Blair and the two newer leaders. Those descriptions furthest to the left are particularly distinctive of Tony Blair, those to the right seen as least applicable to him. The up-down dimension (y-axis) shows the secondary factor, which mainly distinguishes between views of David Cameron and Sir Menzies Campbell. Blair is seen as the leader who is most inflexible, out of touch, narrow minded and who talks down, though who is also good in a crisis. Cameron is thought of as inexperienced, though also a little more down to earth than the other two; Campbell scores by being seen as more honest than most politicians and of sound judgment. Those descriptions near the middle of the graph, including the crucial "understands the problems facing Britain" and "understands world problems" are seen as applying broadly equally to all -- or, perhaps more accurately, to none of the three.

Now see what happens when we take out Blair, and compare the other two leaders to Gordon Brown instead.

In short, not very much -- the main salient features of Tony Blair's image, which are mostly negative, also apply to Gordon Brown. The main contrast is somewhat more clearly a direct one between Cameron and Brown, the differences between these two and Campbell being more of a secondary factor; and while Brown improves on Blair by being judged to share "sound judgment" with Campbell, Cameron now stands alone as the leader with "a lot of personality". Altogether, though, the impression is that Blair's replacement by Brown as Prime Minister will not immediately revolutionise the competition between the leaders, merely occasion some minor adjustments.

Of course, much of the impression the voters have of Brown at the moment is not based on much solid information, and probably owes as much to their general impression of the party and its leaders rubbing off on Brown as to anything else. We have seen often enough in the past that many of the public have clear preconceptions of what they expect the leaders of the various parties to be like and that for lack of better information they tend to assume they are true. Once Mr Brown gets into Number Ten he will have the chance to start building his own image; there are plenty of the public who still have no impression of him, and others who might be persuaded to change their minds. But some of those negative impressions can be very hard to shift once they are ingrained in the public mind. While the outlook could of course be worse for the Chancellor, it could also be a great deal better.

Long-Term Trends On Leader Image

• Conservative Leader Image Trends
• Labour Leader Image Trends
• Liberal Democrat Leader Image Trends

Footnote

Strictly, this is a simplification, but in practice simple proximity tends to provide broadly the same interpretation as the more technically-correct reading. The technique is discussed in greater detail in our 2005 book (Robert Worcester, Roger Mortimore and Paul Baines, Explaining Labour's Landslip, Politico's), and in some statistical textbooks.