Project drear: Starmer’s plan to bore his way to power

The very modest poll ‘bounce’ that Rishi Sunak delivered for the Tories after the farcical Liz Truss premiership has proved to be of the dead cat variety. The most recent YouGov poll showed the Conservatives at just 22 per cent – about half the vote share they achieved in the 2019 general election. This, you might think, explains Labour’s buoyant 47 per cent rating in the same poll. Well, not really.

Because digging deeper into the figures reveals that only 15 per cent of 2019 Tory voters have switched to Keir Starmer’s party. That’s about one in seven. Even the little-known Reform party led by Richard Tice is doing better than that, chalking up the support of 16 per cent of Boris Johnson’s collapsed coalition of Tory voters from four years ago.

This pattern of Tory supporters drifting away and yet not actively switching to Labour has been the way of things for over a year now.