By just how much is Labour’s lead in the Britain-wide polls shrinking?

I still live in hope that the SNP will see sense and replace the highly unpopular Humza Yousaf as leader prior to the UK general election, and if anything the chance that they’ll do that is probably increasing a little.  However, there’s obviously still a significant risk that they won’t, and in that scenario they’re going to need a huge slice of luck to avoid a landmark election defeat.  The obvious way some luck could turn up would be if the Tories mount a significant comeback at GB-wide level.  That could stall Labour’s momentum in Scotland by removing their USP that they’re about to turf the Tories out of government, and it could also mean that the unionist vote will be much more evenly split in Scotland, thus allowing the SNP to come through the middle and hold onto seats they would otherwise lose.

There’s been a perception recently that the Tories have started to make some progress, but I wasn’t sure to what extent that was true.  To find out, I’ve averaged the last six GB-wide polls, and compared the results to the average of the first polls of this calendar year from each of the same six firms (Omnisis, Deltapoll, Techne, YouGov, Redfield & Wilton and Savanta).

As you can see, there has indeed been a significant narrowing of the gap.  It hasn’t been transformational, but around one-quarter of the Labour lead has been shaved off over the last three or four months.  There are still potentially eighteen months to go until polling day, so even if the rate of Tory recovery slows, it’s looking conceivable that Sunak could at least claw his way back into hung parliament territory by then.

I was probably as guilty of anyone at the time of the Trussmageddon of jumping to the conclusion that we had just witnessed a Black Wednesday-type event that pretty much guaranteed a Labour landslide.  That assumption now looks much less sound, partly because Labour’s position in the polls isn’t quite as commanding as it was a year or two before the 1997 election, and partly because Starmer doesn’t dominate Sunak on the preferred Prime Minister question in anything like the way Tony Blair dominated John Major.  Leadership questions in polls are often more predictive of election results than headline voting intention numbers, especially a long way out from polling day.

The pattern we’re seeing potentially offers an important lesson to the SNP too.  It suggests that it’s possible to recover from the mistake of selecting the wrong leader, provided the mistake is rectified long enough before an election, thus allowing voters enough time to put the episode behind them.

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