A big fat YouGov poll!

Yes, here I am, football on the TV (come on Villa!), the spuds are on the hob (soon be burned and Domino's shall be called), laptop on the lap and, to my joy, a poll from YouGov/Channel 4 has just passed my eyes with the detail now on Excel.

So, without further ado, let's see what we have....

First of all, most importantly, the turnout is 2,123 and the polling took place between 20th and 22nd. So:

reputable polling company (check!)

big enough sample size (check!)

timely (check!)


The voting intentions are:

Tory 43%

Labour 38%

Lib Dem 12%

No bones about it, Gordon Brown has pulled it out the bag. A 5% gap is a great result and could even relate to a win for Labour in a general election due to voting anomalies.

The Tories can't complain with 43% really, it's the Lib Dems that are letting them down. 12% is abysmal and Nick Clegg and his team need to really think about what they've been doing over the past few months (or not doing).

Note that the sample size for Scotland is a mere 76 and irrelevant, not that it stopped Calum Cashley doing a little dance at the prospect of winning Edinburgh North and Leith given "Other" got a mighty 37% (Labour 32%, Tories 26%). To be fair, the poll did have the Lib Dems on 6% north of the border so maybe the dance wasn't totally in vain.

Remember the days over a year ago when the Tory party was racked with nerves, scared of their own shadow, couldn't come to together on schools or Europe or anything and Cameron looked close to being out on his ear?

I think they could be back with us before too long.


Drilling into the detail a bit more for more information:

41% believe Gordon Brown would make the best PM at the current time. 27% believe it should be Cameron.

This flips around after the general election where 26% believe it should be Brown and 36% believe it should be Cameron.

50% view Gordon Brown's leadership positively while 46% view it negatively. That's a great result for Gordon as very recently he was seriously struggling on this score. The only down side is that 65% view Cameron positively and only 26% negatively.

Nice to see that 58% of people agree Brown bears a lot of responsibility for the financial mess, I would have hoped for higher given he was Chancellor for 10 years. 28% disagree.

A low 23% of respondents think Brown should step down. Only 4% within Labour voters.


Overall, it's a slight win for the Tories but what is clear to me from this poll is this: Gordon Brown's knight in shining armour, the man that will save his job, is David Cameron.


Anyway, I'm off to phone a pizza.


UPDATE: Just for fun, I updated the Westminster predictor model for the polling results of SNP 37%, Labour 32%, Tories 26% and Lib Dems 6%.

It gave the following: SNP 22 seats, Labour 19 seats, Tories 13 seats, Lib Dems 5 seats.

(Calum Cashley would finish 3rd in Edinburgh North and Leith.)