Remember this poll – exactly a year ago today?
CON 37 LAB 36 LD 17
ComRes: Nov 30 2008
Whatever happened to Brown’s Bank Bailout Bounce?
On November 30 2008, precisely a year ago today, ComRes finished their monthly poll for the Independent which had Labour just one point behind – figures which suggested that Mr. Brown was within a whisker of an overall Labour majority.
This followed an extraordinary couple of months after his widely acknowledged role in the bank bailout – not just for the UK but globally as well. His confidence was at a high and the media narrative was with him and his party.
At the time, as the PB thread shows, the initial reaction was to dismiss the survey as a rogue but other surveys in the run-up to Christmas suggested that the gap was narrowing sharply though to nothing like the margin that ComRes was showing.
Perhaps the most startling was ICM’s December Guardian survey which found a margin of just five points compared with the fifteen recorded only three weeks earlier. Something was happening out there.
Then we had Mr. Brown “saviour of the world” slip at PMQs and the collapse of Woolworths. The mood started to turn and the poll gap edged up again.
Was December 2008, I often wonder, the last time that Brown could have gone to the country and staved off a Tory victory? His argument could not have been more simple. The challenges required a government with a clear mandate not constrained by an imminent general election.
Brown didn’t and the spring of 2009 saw the Damien McBride dismissal and the MPs expenses explosion.