Half of UK voters say they have formed a more favourable view of the Labour party since Keir Starmer became its leader in April, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer. On Monday Starmer will mark his first 100 days since succeeding Jeremy Corbyn, and he has made a far greater positive impact with the electorate than his predecessor did in his early days in charge. The findings will encourage Labour MPs, members and activists, many of whom believed the party would face a minimum period of 10 years of rebuilding after their disastrous general election last December, and that Starmer would struggle to make an impact in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. But the reverse seems to be true according to Opinium’s findings. Significantly, 52% of voters now say they could imagine Starmer inside No 10. Two weeks ago, Opinium found more people cited Starmer as their preferred choice as prime minister (37%) than Boris Johnson (35%). The poll also shows Starmer is now strongly favoured by voters over Johnson when people are asked about the two leaders’ qualities – such as their competence, their ability to take decisions and get things done, and their ability to represent this country abroad.
The main downside for Labour, however, is that Starmer and his shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds are still well behind the Tory leadership team of Johnson and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, when it comes to economic competence and people’s faith in Labour’s ability to run the economy: 42% said they favoured Johnson and Sunak against 26% for Starmer and Dodds. Labour now stands four points behind the Conservatives overall, with the Tories on 42%, Labour on 38% and the Liberal Democrats on 6%. But this represents a remarkable turnaround from the end of March, just after Johnson announced a full lockdown and days before Starmer took charge, when the Tories were on 54%, 26 points ahead of Labour on 28%. Laura Parker, the former national coordinator of Momentum, the grassroots group set up to support Corbyn’s leadership, said that while there had been aspects of Starmer’s early leadership with which some party members had been very unhappy, including his response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey, there was now a willingness across the party to work with him. That would continue, she said, unless he backed away from the radical manifesto on which he fought the leadership election. “We are going to have to build a broad coalition to beat this lot [the Tories] and after four election defeats the party left, centre and right have understood that,” she said. The extent to which Starmer has struck a chord with voters is underlined by responses when people are asked about the leaders’ abilities and qualities in specific areas. When asked about competence, Starmer scores a net positive result of +28 against -4 for Johnson. (These are the scores when the percentage of those who believe they are not competent are subtracted from the percentages who say they are.) On the question of whether they are strong leaders, Johnson scores -2 while Starmer is on +21. Starmer even does better than Johnson when people are asked who would be better at negotiating with the EU with Johnson scoring +2 and Starmer +4.