How can Cameron be stopped if the Tories are in the 40s?

In the panel above are the Tory shares from the latest polls by the six firms that carry out monthly voting intention polls in Britain. There seem to be two clusters – ComRes/ICM/YouGov which have the party in the low 40s with Populus/MORI/BPIX recording shares in the mid-40s.

These have varied from time to time but in spite of all that’s been happening Labour has found it all but impossible to get Cameron’s party out of the 40s since Darling’s budget and the 10p tax band catastrophe last March

This matters because in a 3+ party system a Tory total above the 40% threshold makes it quite difficult for them be stopped from securing a commons majority.

With the Lib Dems and SNP/PC/Green/UKIP/others almost certainly going to total 28/29% between them it’s going to be challenging for Labour to get much more than 30% unless they can find a way of getting voters to switch from Cameron’s party. If they can’t there’s a majority Tory government.

Can they so undermine confidence in Cameron and his team that that becomes a game-changer? They’ve shown no sign of doing that yet and it will be interesting to see if there’s a polling reaction to the George Osborne story.

In a future article I plan to look at the Lib Dem shares which is a central factor in this equation.

Mike Smithson