 A new wave of polling from YouGov has come out and it's not looking particularly good for Kirstamo. It's a significant time for this because we're heading into local, regional and national elections on the 6th of May. And it turns out, if we believe YouGov, labour are trailing the Tories by 14 points. The Conservatives are on 43%. Labour on 29%. The Lib Dems and Greens both on 8%. And as you can see there, the direction of travel is probably what's most significant here. The Tories are up 2. Labour are down 5. And both the Lib Dems and Greens are up 2. To finish the picture reform UK, which is the replacement for the Brexit party, which was the replacement for UKIP, is on 3%. As we should always say when we show you a poll, this is just one poll. There are margins of error here. But the direction of travel is fairly clear. Since January, the Tories have been going up, but not phenomenally. They've gone up sort of a couple of points. Whereas Labour are going down to a more notable extent. So when we see people on Twitter saying this is a vaccine bounce, I don't think that tells the whole story because this isn't just the case of the Tories are going up and Labour are staying steady. No, the Tories are actually staying fairly steady, going up a little bit. But Labour are dropping by a much greater degree. And obviously from that poll you will have seen that according to YouGov, it's partly the Greens and the Lib Dems who are picking up those votes, which is hard to put down to a vaccine bounce. Now, as I should say, this is just one poll. I want to also show you a salvation poll from today, which has Labour up 2 from their previous and this one has the Conservatives still beating Labour by 7%, but by a much smaller gap than was suggested by YouGov. Aaron, this is just one poll, but that is quite a big gap. And this is the lowest school Labour have had since Keir Starmer became leader. Is it significant that they've gone below 30? Yeah, I think the poll is terrible. I mean, even the salvation one, Michael, I know they've gone up, so it looks like, oh, that's good, they've gone up. But that's because salvation last week, I think it went down to 32, did it? It would have gone down to 33, because they're now on 33. Because I think there was one, I think there was a salvation one, because that was when there was a salvation one that came out. I think maybe it went from 32 to 33. And people are like, whoa, that's something. Obviously, all the pollsters have different methods and so on. So opinion tends to be the observer, no comment, they tend to be more favourable to Starmer right now that YouGov ones seem to be less favourable. Of course, a lot of that's because of waiting and so on and so forth. But yeah, these are all very serious pollsters. YouGov is not a sort of joke pollster. Take it very seriously. 29 is terrible. We should, for the sake of balance, point out that when Jeremy Corbyn was leader in the start towards the beginning of 2017, again, this was just before council elections where Labour did perform pretty poorly, they were on 24. And Will Davis, I think quite reasonably points out, this time four years ago, it was about to go higher. So he's saying there that when people who supported Corbyn saw the polling at 24, they said, well, it will go higher, polls change. And in that case, they did change. Now, when people who don't like Starmer see a poll that's on 29, they say, well, this is a catastrophe, the only way is down. Now, I should point out, Will Davis did say, obviously, we can't necessarily just map from one situation to another. Maybe there are underlying conditions that mean that it's going to be harder for Starmer to pick up votes than Jeremy Corbyn. Also, of course, Boris Johnson, less of an unknown than Theresa May was when it comes to political campaigning. But at the same time, we can read too much into polls, can't we Aaron? And also, is it that healthy for the left to be obsessing about movements in polling directions instead of thinking about things that are slightly more fundamental? No, I think that's very fair. And I think that's true. However, you look at this and you look at all the other polls, and there are a few big, essential takeaways. One is that the Tory vote is really stable, right? I mean, again, that's not about paying attention to this or that poll, or that they're on 43 plus, let's say reform, that's 46, if they take their three back in an election. And the whole thing about when I said floor, I don't mean the floor in the polls, I think, you know, because Labour in a European election, just two years ago now, did obviously much worse than high 20s as did the Tories, you know, I mean, in terms of a general election, I think Labour's floor is the high 20s. I should be clear about that. So and that's going off recent history. So Gordon Brown in 2010, got 28.5%. I think they got 28% in 1983. So that is the floor. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying in terms of polls, I'm saying in terms of the general election. And will making that point, which is an important point, yes, they can change. But there are a bunch of elections in three weeks time, right? And that's not and they are the biggest set of elections for a really long time. So we've got two years of local elections. We've got a bunch of Metro Mayor elections. We've got Wales. We've got Scotland. So actually, polling 29, three weeks out from those really big elections is in itself a big story. Although I do agree with your broader point of we shouldn't all be just paying attention to the last poll. In a way, you know, I said it when Starmer came in, I say ignore polls for six months. And actually, it's done really well. Now we're a year and we should be paying attention to the polls. But I agree with the point. But look, Michael, on the whole, well, Corbyn polled poorly, so it's okay for Starmer. Starmer's whole stick was his electable. Starmer's whole stick was that this wouldn't happen. At least with Corbyn, he was saying, look, I want to get a bigger party. I want to mobilize people. I want to change the political conversation, which I think undoubtedly he did. And I really, really believe that. Yeah, he didn't win. So that's why when Starmer comes, I'm saying, I'm electable. People go, great. But even by the standards he's setting, he's doing very poorly. And you have to look at, you know, Labour's laying off 90 people in May, because members are leaving. The polling's not great. His personal approval ratings aren't great. And I think actually, in some ways, Michael, that's the biggest story than this. You know, you've got to have his approval ratings, not who will be best PM, but do you think he's doing a good job? I think last week on minus 24, you know, that's a really serious indictment on a person whose entire pitch was, I'm the big professional, shiny politician. Well, that hasn't worked. And so, a year into his leadership, that has to surely for the people around him, the people that support him, even people watching this who want Starmer to do well and they voted for him and they like him, that has to be food for thought. And if it's not, then I think things could get worse. Well, there's another interesting poll. This was of Labour members. And what for me is slightly surprising here is, as Aaron said, Starmer said, his big pitch was that he's electable. He's not looking that electable. So, I'd have thought maybe some of his supporters and some Labour members would be tiring of him. That doesn't seem to be happening. So, you've got did their survey of Labour members, they tend to be fairly accurate, these ones, they got the leadership right. So, I do kind of trust what they're saying here. They've asked Labour members if Keir Starmer is doing well or badly as a leader. And 64% say well and 34% say badly. And of people who voted for Keir Starmer, 81% say well and 17% say badly. It's only Rebecca Long, Bailey supporters who overwhelmingly think Keir Starmer has done badly. So, that to me says the Labour membership is still giving him the benefit of the doubt. Obviously, this could be the case that there's been a significant amount of churn in the party. So, the people who are unhappy with how Keir Starmer's leading the party has left and then some people who are attracted to him have joined, or more likely actually the membership has shrunk slightly. But yeah, they're giving him the benefit of the doubt. And what's interesting here is this isn't because Labour members are convinced that Keir Starmer will pull through in a general election and have a turnaround of the form that Jeremy Corbyn did. So, you've also asked Labour members, do you think Labour would win in a general election if it happened tomorrow? And 84% say no, the Conservatives would win. Only 12% think Labour would win a general election if it were to happen tomorrow. You might say there's not going to be a snap election. More important is the election which will likely happen in 2024. I think in 2023 is also quite possible. But let's say for the purpose of argument 2024, then 43% say Labour will win and 40% say the Conservatives will win. Obviously, more people think they'll win than won. But you've got 40% who think the Conservatives will win and the approval of Starmer is way, way higher than the 43% who think Labour will win. So, there are lots of people who are willing to have a Labour leader even if they don't think they're going to win a general election. To really push home this point, let's look at the popularity of Labour leaders among Labour members. And what you'll see from this is it has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you can win an election. So, the most popular Labour leader among Labour members is Gordon Brown. 81% have a favourable view of Gordon Brown. Obviously, he didn't win an election. As Aaron often says, he actually took Labour down to one of the worst polling percentages in history. Ed Miliband, again, he didn't win an election. He's the second favourite, 78%. Clement Atley, he would probably be a bit higher if more people had heard of him. I think he probably would be top if you exclude the don't knows. Then you've got Keir Starmer, Kinnick, and the two least popular are Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair. Obviously, Tony Blair, as we're often told, won three general elections. Corbyn had that very impressive boost in 2017 and then a poor election in 2019. But when it comes to success in elections versus popularity among the membership, I think it's pretty clear we can say no correlation. Are you surprised by that, Aaron? Given that one of the explanations for Keir Starmer's success in the leadership election in 2020 was that people thought, well, we want a leader who can win, so we'll vote for Keir Starmer, turns out they don't seem to really care if the leader can win. Yeah, it's about the sample. Like you say, if 100,000 people have left and they're all Jeremy Corbyn fans, the fact he's still polling above Blair is interesting, actually. That is in itself surprising. I would agree with all the people that are listed there, the two most successful politicians. Clearly, I think if you just look at the results of Tony Blair and then Jeremy Corbyn, we go, Jeremy Corbyn, they fell to this 2017 result was very good. They had very good local election results, particularly in 2018. He did very well on a bunch of other fronts. So I think they're clearly the most successful out of that bunch. I assume you're forgetting about Clement Attlee. Yeah, the contemporary leaders. Since Blair, so you've got Blair Brown, Ed Miliband, and then Corbyn and Starmer. Starmer to be fair, we can't judge him so far because he's not actually had an election. We can probably do that after May. So I thought actually that going back to the Rebecca Longbailey supporters think Starmer is doing a bad job. I suspect that's because they're just better informed. They're probably more likely to get their news from new media. They're probably younger. That's not to say that other people can't be well informed, but I think there's probably something of a trend there. I think people who are highly informed politically will know that actually Starmer's pitch is electability and in polling, he's not doing very well. Whereas I think there is clearly a big chunk of people who voted for him who, yeah, they might pet into politics once a fortnight, and they'll be thinking, oh, yeah, he's doing okay. And they might watch BBC Question Time, but of course, people lie through their teeth and they'll say, well, they're neck and neck or BBC Any questions. Oh, they were really close. Sam's done a great job. But what the polling showed is that they're not actually deluded and convinced that Labour are issuing for the next general election. There are lots of people who both think that the Conservatives will win the next general election and gear Starmer's doing a good job. My point is purely about, is he doing a good or bad job? And I think the people that are saying he's doing a bad job just happens to maybe be younger, better informed. I think it's possible to say Starmer's doing a good job and that Labour won't win. I think that's a plausible thing to say. I don't think Labour will win the next general election. I also think Starmer's doing a bad job, but I can see why you wouldn't think that. And again, we're looking into a bunch of... Michael, people are immersed in lies and spin and bullshit. Rather than say Labour lost the last election by, I think it was 11, 12 points, 32 to 44, something like that. By the way, that's the baseline because it's a general election. We're not talking about a sample in a poll of 3,000 people. We're literally talking about tens of millions of people voting. That's the most accurate way of working out who people want. But rather than do that, they say, oh, there's a poll in January where Labour with 25 points behind. So actually he's doing okay. How can you appeal to something with a sample of 3,000 and not a general election? And one month before, with tens of millions of people voting, it's basic mendacity and deception. Clearly, let's use as the baseline the last general election. And if we're using that as the baseline, Starmer, on a bunch of polls, I think one was Sevation, one was YouGov, maybe one was Comrades, but Sevation had a couple of really bad ones. And YouGov, Starmer has gone nowhere, right? And that, of course, is not the official, that's not the official line. The Sunday Times last week did that awful, awful profile of Starmer into you rather. And they said, he's taken the party a long way. It's like somebody, they had a gunshot wound in the last election. He stemmed the bleeding. What are you talking about? They're losing members. They're polling numbers are the same. I mean, we'll find out, I may, right? I mean, it's all speculation and conjecture, really. But right now, Labour are going nowhere fast. And the big thing is, Michael, I'll finish with this, you know, well, again, Will Davies is right. You know, people say, well, a government's only won, I think five or six by elections in history. Yeah, one of them was in Copeland in 2017, like four or five, six weeks later, we have Labour get 40%. So yes, things can turn around. But what's different this time is that before that was just the Tories running away with it 45% of the vote. What we're seeing now instead is that the Greens and the Lib Dems are on 8% each, right? So you've got two parties arguably pitching to the left of Labour, both edging up. And I think that's a real problem for Labour. I think that's the real problem. If the Lib Dems and Greens both do well in the general election, by which I mean, both get between 8% and 10%, I think Labour have huge problems. Because all of a sudden, then the electoral kind of arithmetic looks very, very bad for them. And, you know, they could get high 20s, rather, and be decimated because you've got the Northern Independence Party getting 2%, 3% in 2030 seats. You've got the Greens in a bunch of marginals around London, for instance, in bigger cities. So it's very complicated once you start to move back to a four or five party system. And I think the Greens and the Lib Dems are doing well. I think that's what should worry Labour more than anything else.