Whenever there is a new Prime Minister the pollster, Ipsos, issues its updated version of the above chart showing the opening satisfaction ratings for the new man or woman at Number 10.

Ipsos is able to do this because it has been in the UK political polling longer than anybody else

I don’t think we should read too much into how Sunak fares. I would argue, the ratings were largely formed by the circumstances in which he took over from Liz Truss a few weeks ago.

We don’t need here to rehearse here the circumstances that saw Sunak become Prime Minister but he got it with a fast track election designed to ensure that there was no contest. This meant that there was no accompanying good publicity of the selection process. It came over as a bit of a shambles and I think Sunak is feeling the force of that in the polling numbers that he is now getting.

A big benefit of starting with such awful numbers is that it doesn’t take much for him to be able to demonstrate an improvement

Mike Smithson