Ming’s party at lowest point since the Mark Oaten revelations

A new YouGov poll in the Sunday Times this morning has the Lib Dems down at their lowest point with the internet pollster since the Mark Oaten crisis during the leadership contest earlier in the year. The shares are compared with the Telegraph YouGov poll reported on Friday are – CON 37% (nc): LAB 32% (-1): LD 15% (-2).

This decline is in line with the trend from other polls. Earlier in the week the pollster which has been showing the best Lib Dems ratings, ICM, had the party down 2% at 18% and Mori was reporting a similar 2 point fall off in support.

In the six months before David Cameron’s election as Tory leader what was then Charles Kennedy’s party was averaging more than 20% with YouGov – so according to today’s numbers support is down by a quarter.

This comes at a time when Labour has come under serious pressure following the loans probe and the Saudi arms case issue.

The Sunday Times runs the YouGov story under the headline “Women Flock to Cameron” and focuses on the differential male-female support that we have reported on here before. It notes that the Tories have an 8% lead amongst women but only a 1% lead amongst men.

This cuts both ways. With these same figures the paper could easily have put the focus on the apparent failure of the Tories to increase support from men

Also the Sunday Times chooses to compare Labour’s 32% share in today’s survey with the first YouGov poll of 2006 when Blair-Brown’s party was on 40%. That’s an unfair comparison because that poll was taken just after the Mark Oaten case when the Lib Dems had slipped to 13%.

The other big political news in the Sundays is a report in the Indy under the heading “No 10 ‘in panic’ as Yard extends ‘cash for honours’ inquiry”. According to Marie Woolf, the paper’s political editor, “….police are understood to have widened their inquiry and to be examining several aspects of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (PPERA) which the party is believed to have flouted. Sources close to the inquiry believe the case for a prosecution is getting stronger.”

Mike Smithson