Why did 313 Labour MPs ignore this polling?
They can’t claim that it wasn’t all predicted
It’s suddenly become fashionable in the Labour party to be a Brown-sceptic. Hardly a day goes by before some new faction within the movement starts raising questions about his style of leadership and electability. Yet they were all warned two years ago..
For in the year before Brown’s coronation a vast body of polling evidence built up that Labour would do much worse with him as a leader than the standard voting intentions. The results of the monthly named leader questions, reproduced above from UKPollingReport, were there for all to see. In every case bar one Labour polled much worse with Brown named as leader than the headline figures.
Yet just two years ago Team Brown managed to convince 313 Labour MPs to give him a coronation and block out a challenge.
For a long period in the run-up to June 2007 I argued, and for a time took a big betting position on the proposition, that nobody who was polling so badly against Cameron when the “named leader†question was put could possibly make it to the top job. It seemed a no-brainer.
Parties like to keep in power and two of our most respected pollsters were saying month after month that Gordon was an electoral liability – not an electoral asset.
Yet whenever I highlighted this on the site I got rubbished and attacked sometimes with great ferocity. For there was a determined campaign to undermine this polling which seemd to have the suppoort of severral leading commentators in the mainstream media. Here on PB we saw “astro-turfers†coming out in their droves to argue that these polls should be ignored – it was all hypothetical they said.
Well the poll rubbishers won the argument and Labour’s current polling plight is the result.
Looking back one can only marvel at the way Gord’s coronation campaign succeeded and how they managed to diss the polls. The only problem is that Labour will be facing a general election within a year and the prospects for many of the 313 who signed up for Gordon look very bleak indeed. More fool them.