I was so taken by David Herdson’s observation in the previous thread header about how poor the current Ipsos MORI government satisfaction ratings that I thought I would dig into the pollster’s huge archive to see if there were historical precdents.

What’s great about the firm which has been polling UK politics since the 1970s is that it has been asking the same questions in the same format over the decades. You can therefore make comparisons.

Going through the the archive poor negative numbers were indicative of a government that was about to lose power.

The big difference between now and 1997, of course, is that the government ratings then were showing a broad picture that was similar to the voting intention ones. That is not happening now.

What it says about what will happen on December 12th I don’t know but it certainly adds to the overall uncertainty.

Just in case you think that the current ratings are an outlier they are the best ratings for the Government since Johnson became PM.

Mike Smithson

Follow @MSmithsonPB

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