Are Yes voters abandoning the SNP?

New party leaders usually deliver their party a boost in the polls. One of the first signs that voters were not comfortable with Liz Truss as their Prime Minister was the absence of any rise in Conservative fortunes following her success last September in securing the keys to 10 Downing St. Those doubts were then simply strongly amplified when the financial markets reacted adversely to her ‘fiscal event’ in which she and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed to fund tax cuts via borrowing. 

Half a year later, her successor, Rishi Sunak, has so far only had modest success in reversing the damage done to his party’s reputation for good government – including among the many Leave supporters who backed the Conservatives in 2019 in order to ‘get Brexit done’. Their loyalty was far from unconditional.