Dominic Cummings’s attack on the PM has so far had little effect on public opinion

Four opinion polls have been carried out since Dominic Cummings gave his evidence to MPs about the prime minister’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Cummings spoke on Wednesday, for virtually the whole day, and the polls were all carried out on Thursday and Friday.

Taking all four polls together, there does not seem to have been a significant change in support for the parties. The average Conservative lead was 11 points. The average Conservative lead in the previous polls from the same companies was 13 points.

As Matt Singh of Number Cruncher Politics said: “Our poll had a 12-point Tory lead, Survation had 10, YouGov had 14, Opinium had 6. Without debating who is right or wrong, I wonder which of these polls will get the most attention?”

He was right that the fall in the Tory lead reported by Opinium, from 13 points two weeks ago to 6 points now, was widely noticed. Opinium also found that net approval of the government’s handling of coronavirus had fallen from plus 14 to zero, and that Boris Johnson’s approval rating had fallen from plus 6 to minus 6 – while Keir Starmer’s rating had held steady at minus 9.

YouGov had also found a small fall in Johnson’s advantage over Starmer when people were asked which of them would make the better prime minister: Johnson’s lead had fallen from 16 points to 12 in a week.

But the other two pollsters showed shifts in the opposite direction. Survation, which last month reported a 1-point Tory lead, now puts the Tories 10 points ahead, while Johnson’s favourability rating has improved by 8 points and Starmer’s has declined by 10. Number Cruncher Politics had a 9-point Tory lead last month and a 12-point lead now.

So it may be that Cummings’s attack on his former boss has started to turn some voters away from the prime minister and the Conservative Party, but it has not had a decisive, hammer-blow effect. These events rarely do. It is only things such as the collapse of John Major’s European exchange rate mechanism policy in 1992 that have an immediate and dramatic effect on the polls.

Many of Cummings’s criticisms of Johnson had been advertised in advance, and many of them either reinforce the views already held by those who dislike the prime minister or could be brushed aside by those who like him. Things may change over the next few weeks, if Cummings produces damning documentary evidence, or if the government’s scientific advisers back up his criticisms. But if this happens it would probably produce a slow shift in opinion, just as the success of the vaccines produced a gradual widening of the Tory lead since the start of the year.

I thought one of the most interesting poll findings over the weekend was the suggestion in the Opinium poll that the public is moving towards wanting the Covid restrictions to be lifted. Whereas for most of the pandemic, the British people have tended to think that the rules were not strict enough and that the government was lifting them too early, they are now divided by 44 per cent to 43 per cent in favour of wanting to ease restrictions as planned on 21 June – the 44 per cent being made up of 34 per cent who want to open up as planned and 10 per cent who want to open up earlier.