Clarke’s advantage fades away

YouGov’s Stephan Shakespeare on how the public would view the four candidates — if they were all better known

Up to now, polls on the Conservative leadership have been flawed in a fundamental way: they have tried to gauge public reaction to a group of candidates, when one of them is much better known than the rest. But this contest is about the future — about how they might be regarded after they become leader, when the public gets to know them better. And so YouGov and The Spectator designed a poll to get some vital added insight.

First, we asked 4,000 people representative of the UK electorate how likely they were to vote for each of the main parties, on a scale from 0 to 10. Labour’s average rating was 4.0, the Conservatives’ 3.3, and the Liberal Democrats’ 3.2. We then randomly split them into four groups, with each group finding out more about just one of the main candidates.