Read YouGov's Peter Kellner on his exclusive new Tory polling for Prospect
Voters know what to do in tough times. By 45 per cent to 9 per cent, they trust the Conservatives to take tough decisions, and so they vote Tory. And in happier times? They vote Labour because they think “its heart is in the right place.” Fifty-two per cent think the Conservatives appeal to one section of society rather than to the whole country. Only 20 per cent think the same of Labour. The pattern has asserted itself again and again. Britain embraced Winston Churchill as a war leader, but rejected him for Clement Attlee in 1945 when the nation wanted to “win the peace.” Britons wanted Margaret Thatcher rather than James Callaghan in 1979 to tackle union militancy, but by 1997 they wanted Tony Blair to “save the NHS” and invest in public services. In 2010 they turned towards David Cameron to avert a debt crisis. But what about the coming general election?
The poll in May will be a “no man’s land” election—somewhere between tough times and a more hopeful mood of leaving recession behind. The Prime Minister has, appropriately in one sense, been sending out mixed signals. He says that many tough decisions lie ahead, but he’s simultaneously promising tax cuts for the middle class, extra money for the National Health Service and massive investments in new roads and railways. Giveaways had always been planned as part of the Tories’ re-election bid, but so had elimination of the deficit—and that hasn’t been achieved, which should have meant a recalibration of their re-election strategy.
My advice to Cameron is to pick up urgently some of the lessons from those who have won in tough times, and staple them to ideas about a more optimistic—and yes, compassionate—conservatism that he was once well placed to offer voters, although he has muddied the message since.
Cameron should from the start have emulated Stephen Harper, leader of Canada’s Conservatives and Prime Minister since 2006, re-elected with an increased majority in 2011. Harper embodies the tough times conservatism that has enjoyed electoral success around the world since the global financial crisis began in 2007.
The international left had expected to do well after the crash and to benefit from a popular backlash against capitalism. Neither the backlash nor an era of left-of-centre dominance materialised. Instead, this period has largely been defined by victories for the centre-right—for Angela Merkel in Germany, Tony Abbott in Australia, John Key in New Zealand, Mariano Rajoy in Spain, Shinzo Abe in Japan, Cameron and Harper himself. The left has Matteo Renzi in Italy and François Hollande in France, of course, but until the French President’s sterling performance after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, they had probably wished they did not.
The only really successful left-wing politician in the world today is Barack Obama in the United States. He has certainly been a consequential President, enacting far-reaching healthcare reform, overseeing a huge Keynesian stimulus to the economy and undoing the foreign policy of his Republican predecessor. And since last November’s mid-term elections, in which the Democratic Party was routed, Obama has introduced immigration reforms, normalised relations with Cuba and approved a frontal assault against the interrogation methods deployed by the CIA in the aftermath of 9/11.
But look at the political cost of this über-liberalism: only the White House, admittedly the biggest prize by far, eludes the Republicans. They not only gained control of the Senate in November, they also tightened their grip on the House of Representatives. You have to go back a hundred years to find a period when the Republicans enjoyed such a majority. Beyond Washington they are doing even better: they have complete control of 24 states, meaning they hold the Governor’s mansion and both the Senate and House chambers. The Democrats control just six states to the same extent.
Conservatives like Harper understand that voters today are cautious. They’ve seen the chaos in the eurozone, the invasion of Iraq and the sheer expense of “Obamacare.” They have seen what happens when politicians take bold steps and, generally, they’ve not been impressed. They want to be reassured, not tossed about by large shifts in policy which bring the possibility of large mistakes. In his brilliant book on the Harper years, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, Paul Wells compares the Harper philosophy to the “tiki-taka” playing style that has brought Spanish football teams such success over the past decade. Doug Finley, a key advisor to Harper before his untimely death in 2013, told Wells that, like FC Barcelona, Harper believed in “very tight possession”—“Never give the ball away, because if you have the ball, they can’t score a goal.” And that’s the explanation for the title of Wells’s book. “The longer I’m Prime Minister,” Harper would tell his staff, “the longer I’m Prime Minister.” Harper believes that you make change by occupying office for extended periods of time, by running marathons, not sprints. You deliver change not by one or two long balls kicked hopefully into the distance, but through hundreds of small moves—appointments to health boards, courts and other public sector decision-making boards, changes to arts funding and regulatory reform. Harper believes in a conservative version of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the “long march through the institutions.”
Incrementalism ought to be the first instinct of victorious conservatives in tough times. This has been true of Merkel in Germany, the US Republicans at state level and of John Key in New Zealand. They don’t slash spending, they trim it. They don’t abolish functions of the state, they reform them. They don’t declare war on the big banks, but get them to pay more tax. They don’t ever get too far ahead of public opinion, but instead work hard to understand it. (Harper’s advisors do not understand, for example, why Cameron supported gay marriage. And one might add that his government has been too radical in areas where it promised stability, such as the NHS.) This may be frustrating for conservatives who, like me, cut their political teeth in the heady 1980s but, for the moment, it’s a successful recipe—from Wellington to Ottawa and from Berlin to the Governor’s mansion in Columbus, Ohio.
Conservative leaders also need to remember that while many members of their parties are libertarian, few voters are. (Harper has explicitly rejected the libertarian creed in a speech.) A recent Pew survey of US voters found that only 11 per cent regarded themselves as libertarian, and America is supposedly the land of the free. Moreover, libertarianism is not just rare, it’s very male and people give up on it as they get older. Tory MP David Willetts once joked that a conservative is a libertarian with children (or, he might have added, with a pension pot). Only 7 per cent of women in America are libertarian, and only 9 per cent of senior citizens. In tough times people are particularly risk averse and they appreciate the security that the state can provide.
Tough times conservatives are also penny-wise. They don’t promise things that cannot be done—stopping climate change, for example. Harper opted out of the Kyoto treaty on climate change because the world’s biggest emitters—China and the US—weren’t signed up to it. Whether it’s energy bills, the tax burden or housing costs, voters in recession-struck countries are consistently preferring penny-pinching conservative politicians to high-spending left-wing parties.
These characteristics of tough times conservatives help explain the current ascendancy of the centre right. If David Cameron had adopted them more enthusiastically he would be in a much better position ahead of this year’s election. But I don’t want to argue that they should be the permanent blueprint for conservatism.
The global left won’t remain disorganised forever. Some great new cause—inequality, perhaps, climate change or opposition to war—will re-energise it. And the natural entropy of political projects will cause some right-of-centre governments to fall. Moreover, the financial crisis will come to an end. The need for fiscal restraint will become less urgent, even if it won’t recede completely. Voters will want something better for themselves and their children. This recent period of conservative ascendancy was preceded, after all, by the era of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Jean Chrétien and José Zapatero. Conservative parties did poorly during the boom years. How can the British Conservatives buck the historical trend and ensure that the old pattern doesn’t reassert itself?
First they should sound more optimistic. There has always been a significant strain of pessimism on the right. Many right-wingers hate both what Britain has become and where it is going. In the US, the Republican Bob Dole famously promised to be a bridge to America’s past when he stood for the White House in 1996. Bill Clinton responded by promising to build a bridge to the 21st century—and won handily.
One of the absurdities of conservative pessimism is that the age we live in—with the Berlin Wall a distant memory, life expectancy rising, free trade booming and hunger retreating—has largely been brought about by the expansion of capitalism. This is an age for conservatives to savour (albeit not uncritically). It is no accident that the most successful conservative politicians from Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to Boris Johnson today have been optimists. “Peacetime” conservatives must be optimistic, too—optimistic about extending home ownership, strengthening moderate Islam, using technology to improve cash-strapped public services and ensuring that freedom of religious worship coexists with greater equality for women, gay people and all minorities.
The Conservatives should also make peace with the idea of government. The debate about whether government should be bigger or smaller ends up giving the impression that conservatives are anti-government, while creating a different, complementary problem for the left. Only 5 per cent of Britons would vote for an anti-state party. They don’t want sprawling, expensive government, but neither do they want a “nightwatchman” state or anything close to it. The Conservatives will need to have a theory of the state, therefore. It should set out what an intelligent state would do—it would spend less money on welfare and more on the transport, energy and educational infrastructure that tomorrow’s economy depends upon. It would spend less on housing benefit and more on building new towns. It would spend less on caring for broken families and more on preventing family breakdown from happening in the first place.
The Conservatives won’t win as a party of small government. Nor will they win if they appear to be the party of the rich. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so politically depressed as I was on Monday 29th September 2014. George Osborne got up at the Conservative Party’s annual conference to announce that he would be freezing the in-work benefits of millions of low-paid workers. Given the parlous state of Britain’s public finances, I don’t doubt that such a measure might be necessary, but why was it the only saving being announced by a Tory Chancellor? Where was the sense that “we’re all in this together”? Where was the temporary budget levy on the wealthy of the kind proposed by Tony Abbott in Australia? Osborne’s announcement seemed almost punitive. There seemed to be no recognition of the Tories’ core problem—that it is seen by voters as the party of the rich. British families on the lowest incomes pay a larger percentage of their gross earnings in tax than any other income group.
Conservatives need to acknowledge some of the force of criticisms of capitalism and find a better response. Conservatism didn’t begin with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s and their necessary emphasis on rolling back the frontiers of an over-expanded state. No one understood this better than Thatcher herself. In a chapter about virtue in her 1995 book The Path to Power, she warned that “it is far from clear that a capitalist economy and a free society can continue to function if substantial minorities flout the moral, legal and administrative rules and conventions under which everyone else operates.” A conservatism equipped for good times will take up the Thatcher challenge to work out how to support the Burkean “little platoons” and those dimensions of life that exist beyond the free market. That endeavour will focus on the family, the greatest provider of welfare, education, companionship, redistribution and love ever devised.
Conservatives should also be sceptical of pundits. Most media commentators have to write columns at least once a week. The pressures of modern journalism—and the need to feed social media—mean many columnists write more often than that. People like me are under constant pressure to say new things. We’re entertainers as well as journalists, and unlike political parties we don’t have large research or polling budgets to test whether our views are in tune with voters. Electors could not be more different from columnists, however, and it’s wiser for politicians to listen to the steady beat of public opinion than the racing pulses of the punditocracy. Jim Messina, a former advisor to Barack Obama who, in an instance of political cross-dressing, is currently working for David Cameron, has told Tory MPs that the average voter thinks about party politics for four minutes per week. I think about party politics for four minutes every four minutes, at least when I’m at work. Tough times conservatives ignore novelty and Twitter-driven excitements. They focus on the three or four big things that matter to voters.
One final thought about the coming election. The identity of the next government is in question not only because we are in something of a no man’s land between the era of austerity and what we hope is a new era of growth. It’s in question because the British right is split. Conservatives cannot win in tough times, or in good times, if they neglect to maintain a broad church.
The former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, the world’s most successful living conservative leader, predicted the split on the right that is now disfiguring British politics when I met him in Sydney in 2006. He warned that Cameron would lose his core supporters if he continued to ignore their concerns about Europe, tax and immigration. This was the period in which Cameron was ruling out unfunded tax cuts, matching Labour’s spending plans, refusing to talk about immigration, rejecting reform of the European Union and opposing grammar schools. We know what happened. Ukip emerged and split the right on a scale not seen before in the postwar period.
Howard’s advice was that while reaching out to floating voters was as important as tending the party base, both needed to be done—and in roughly equal measure. Post-austerity conservatives will be modernisers—modernising the party’s attitude to the future, to government, to the disadvantaged and to the family. They will remember the Churchill of the pre-war period, committed to providing “the finest social ambulance service in the world” as well as ladders of opportunity. But they will not neglect the core centre-right identity of their movements. They will know that expert party management is as important for a successful leader or political project as being good on TV. A house divided against itself can never stand, let alone win difficult, no man’s land elections.
Read YouGov's Peter Kellner on his exclusive new Tory polling for Prospect
Voters know what to do in tough times. By 45 per cent to 9 per cent, they trust the Conservatives to take tough decisions, and so they vote Tory. And in happier times? They vote Labour because they think “its heart is in the right place.” Fifty-two per cent think the Conservatives appeal to one section of society rather than to the whole country. Only 20 per cent think the same of Labour. The pattern has asserted itself again and again. Britain embraced Winston Churchill as a war leader, but rejected him for Clement Attlee in 1945 when the nation wanted to “win the peace.” Britons wanted Margaret Thatcher rather than James Callaghan in 1979 to tackle union militancy, but by 1997 they wanted Tony Blair to “save the NHS” and invest in public services. In 2010 they turned towards David Cameron to avert a debt crisis. But what about the coming general election?
The poll in May will be a “no man’s land” election—somewhere between tough times and a more hopeful mood of leaving recession behind. The Prime Minister has, appropriately in one sense, been sending out mixed signals. He says that many tough decisions lie ahead, but he’s simultaneously promising tax cuts for the middle class, extra money for the National Health Service and massive investments in new roads and railways. Giveaways had always been planned as part of the Tories’ re-election bid, but so had elimination of the deficit—and that hasn’t been achieved, which should have meant a recalibration of their re-election strategy.
My advice to Cameron is to pick up urgently some of the lessons from those who have won in tough times, and staple them to ideas about a more optimistic—and yes, compassionate—conservatism that he was once well placed to offer voters, although he has muddied the message since.
Cameron should from the start have emulated Stephen Harper, leader of Canada’s Conservatives and Prime Minister since 2006, re-elected with an increased majority in 2011. Harper embodies the tough times conservatism that has enjoyed electoral success around the world since the global financial crisis began in 2007.
The international left had expected to do well after the crash and to benefit from a popular backlash against capitalism. Neither the backlash nor an era of left-of-centre dominance materialised. Instead, this period has largely been defined by victories for the centre-right—for Angela Merkel in Germany, Tony Abbott in Australia, John Key in New Zealand, Mariano Rajoy in Spain, Shinzo Abe in Japan, Cameron and Harper himself. The left has Matteo Renzi in Italy and François Hollande in France, of course, but until the French President’s sterling performance after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, they had probably wished they did not.
The only really successful left-wing politician in the world today is Barack Obama in the United States. He has certainly been a consequential President, enacting far-reaching healthcare reform, overseeing a huge Keynesian stimulus to the economy and undoing the foreign policy of his Republican predecessor. And since last November’s mid-term elections, in which the Democratic Party was routed, Obama has introduced immigration reforms, normalised relations with Cuba and approved a frontal assault against the interrogation methods deployed by the CIA in the aftermath of 9/11.
But look at the political cost of this über-liberalism: only the White House, admittedly the biggest prize by far, eludes the Republicans. They not only gained control of the Senate in November, they also tightened their grip on the House of Representatives. You have to go back a hundred years to find a period when the Republicans enjoyed such a majority. Beyond Washington they are doing even better: they have complete control of 24 states, meaning they hold the Governor’s mansion and both the Senate and House chambers. The Democrats control just six states to the same extent.
The only really successful left-wing politician in the world today is Barack Obama in the United StatesHarper does not have a grand vision for Canada—at least not one he is willing to share with voters. But we can still identify some of the main features of his conservatism—Cameron, take note.
Conservatives like Harper understand that voters today are cautious. They’ve seen the chaos in the eurozone, the invasion of Iraq and the sheer expense of “Obamacare.” They have seen what happens when politicians take bold steps and, generally, they’ve not been impressed. They want to be reassured, not tossed about by large shifts in policy which bring the possibility of large mistakes. In his brilliant book on the Harper years, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, Paul Wells compares the Harper philosophy to the “tiki-taka” playing style that has brought Spanish football teams such success over the past decade. Doug Finley, a key advisor to Harper before his untimely death in 2013, told Wells that, like FC Barcelona, Harper believed in “very tight possession”—“Never give the ball away, because if you have the ball, they can’t score a goal.” And that’s the explanation for the title of Wells’s book. “The longer I’m Prime Minister,” Harper would tell his staff, “the longer I’m Prime Minister.” Harper believes that you make change by occupying office for extended periods of time, by running marathons, not sprints. You deliver change not by one or two long balls kicked hopefully into the distance, but through hundreds of small moves—appointments to health boards, courts and other public sector decision-making boards, changes to arts funding and regulatory reform. Harper believes in a conservative version of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the “long march through the institutions.”
Incrementalism ought to be the first instinct of victorious conservatives in tough times. This has been true of Merkel in Germany, the US Republicans at state level and of John Key in New Zealand. They don’t slash spending, they trim it. They don’t abolish functions of the state, they reform them. They don’t declare war on the big banks, but get them to pay more tax. They don’t ever get too far ahead of public opinion, but instead work hard to understand it. (Harper’s advisors do not understand, for example, why Cameron supported gay marriage. And one might add that his government has been too radical in areas where it promised stability, such as the NHS.) This may be frustrating for conservatives who, like me, cut their political teeth in the heady 1980s but, for the moment, it’s a successful recipe—from Wellington to Ottawa and from Berlin to the Governor’s mansion in Columbus, Ohio.
Conservative leaders also need to remember that while many members of their parties are libertarian, few voters are. (Harper has explicitly rejected the libertarian creed in a speech.) A recent Pew survey of US voters found that only 11 per cent regarded themselves as libertarian, and America is supposedly the land of the free. Moreover, libertarianism is not just rare, it’s very male and people give up on it as they get older. Tory MP David Willetts once joked that a conservative is a libertarian with children (or, he might have added, with a pension pot). Only 7 per cent of women in America are libertarian, and only 9 per cent of senior citizens. In tough times people are particularly risk averse and they appreciate the security that the state can provide.
Tough times conservatives are also penny-wise. They don’t promise things that cannot be done—stopping climate change, for example. Harper opted out of the Kyoto treaty on climate change because the world’s biggest emitters—China and the US—weren’t signed up to it. Whether it’s energy bills, the tax burden or housing costs, voters in recession-struck countries are consistently preferring penny-pinching conservative politicians to high-spending left-wing parties.
These characteristics of tough times conservatives help explain the current ascendancy of the centre right. If David Cameron had adopted them more enthusiastically he would be in a much better position ahead of this year’s election. But I don’t want to argue that they should be the permanent blueprint for conservatism.
The global left won’t remain disorganised forever. Some great new cause—inequality, perhaps, climate change or opposition to war—will re-energise it. And the natural entropy of political projects will cause some right-of-centre governments to fall. Moreover, the financial crisis will come to an end. The need for fiscal restraint will become less urgent, even if it won’t recede completely. Voters will want something better for themselves and their children. This recent period of conservative ascendancy was preceded, after all, by the era of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Jean Chrétien and José Zapatero. Conservative parties did poorly during the boom years. How can the British Conservatives buck the historical trend and ensure that the old pattern doesn’t reassert itself?
First they should sound more optimistic. There has always been a significant strain of pessimism on the right. Many right-wingers hate both what Britain has become and where it is going. In the US, the Republican Bob Dole famously promised to be a bridge to America’s past when he stood for the White House in 1996. Bill Clinton responded by promising to build a bridge to the 21st century—and won handily.
One of the absurdities of conservative pessimism is that the age we live in—with the Berlin Wall a distant memory, life expectancy rising, free trade booming and hunger retreating—has largely been brought about by the expansion of capitalism. This is an age for conservatives to savour (albeit not uncritically). It is no accident that the most successful conservative politicians from Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to Boris Johnson today have been optimists. “Peacetime” conservatives must be optimistic, too—optimistic about extending home ownership, strengthening moderate Islam, using technology to improve cash-strapped public services and ensuring that freedom of religious worship coexists with greater equality for women, gay people and all minorities.
The Conservatives should also make peace with the idea of government. The debate about whether government should be bigger or smaller ends up giving the impression that conservatives are anti-government, while creating a different, complementary problem for the left. Only 5 per cent of Britons would vote for an anti-state party. They don’t want sprawling, expensive government, but neither do they want a “nightwatchman” state or anything close to it. The Conservatives will need to have a theory of the state, therefore. It should set out what an intelligent state would do—it would spend less money on welfare and more on the transport, energy and educational infrastructure that tomorrow’s economy depends upon. It would spend less on housing benefit and more on building new towns. It would spend less on caring for broken families and more on preventing family breakdown from happening in the first place.
The Conservatives won’t win as a party of small government. Nor will they win if they appear to be the party of the rich. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so politically depressed as I was on Monday 29th September 2014. George Osborne got up at the Conservative Party’s annual conference to announce that he would be freezing the in-work benefits of millions of low-paid workers. Given the parlous state of Britain’s public finances, I don’t doubt that such a measure might be necessary, but why was it the only saving being announced by a Tory Chancellor? Where was the sense that “we’re all in this together”? Where was the temporary budget levy on the wealthy of the kind proposed by Tony Abbott in Australia? Osborne’s announcement seemed almost punitive. There seemed to be no recognition of the Tories’ core problem—that it is seen by voters as the party of the rich. British families on the lowest incomes pay a larger percentage of their gross earnings in tax than any other income group.
The identity of the next government is in question not only because we are in something of a no man’s land between the era of austerity and what we hope is a new era of growth. It’s in question because the British right is splitChanging this has to be the priority for conservatives in a more benign economic climate. There has to be tax justice across income groups and across the generations. There has to be a concerted effort to tackle the sense that western societies are not just becoming more unequal, but that inequality is unfair because it deprives people born on the wrong side of the tracks of a reasonable chance of making their way up the social ladder. As conservatives such as Rand Paul in the US and Jesse Norman, MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, in the United Kingdom have argued, crony capitalism and the political connections that underpin it must be dismantled. Ten years after David Cameron promised to “modernise” the Conservative Party, modernisation has hardly begun. Tory modernisation should never have primarily been about appearing greener, more liberal or more urban. It should have been about a solidarity with the low-paid—with the people who aren’t automatic beneficiaries of globalisation. These are the people for whom the UK Independence Party currently speaks.
Conservatives need to acknowledge some of the force of criticisms of capitalism and find a better response. Conservatism didn’t begin with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s and their necessary emphasis on rolling back the frontiers of an over-expanded state. No one understood this better than Thatcher herself. In a chapter about virtue in her 1995 book The Path to Power, she warned that “it is far from clear that a capitalist economy and a free society can continue to function if substantial minorities flout the moral, legal and administrative rules and conventions under which everyone else operates.” A conservatism equipped for good times will take up the Thatcher challenge to work out how to support the Burkean “little platoons” and those dimensions of life that exist beyond the free market. That endeavour will focus on the family, the greatest provider of welfare, education, companionship, redistribution and love ever devised.
Conservatives should also be sceptical of pundits. Most media commentators have to write columns at least once a week. The pressures of modern journalism—and the need to feed social media—mean many columnists write more often than that. People like me are under constant pressure to say new things. We’re entertainers as well as journalists, and unlike political parties we don’t have large research or polling budgets to test whether our views are in tune with voters. Electors could not be more different from columnists, however, and it’s wiser for politicians to listen to the steady beat of public opinion than the racing pulses of the punditocracy. Jim Messina, a former advisor to Barack Obama who, in an instance of political cross-dressing, is currently working for David Cameron, has told Tory MPs that the average voter thinks about party politics for four minutes per week. I think about party politics for four minutes every four minutes, at least when I’m at work. Tough times conservatives ignore novelty and Twitter-driven excitements. They focus on the three or four big things that matter to voters.
One final thought about the coming election. The identity of the next government is in question not only because we are in something of a no man’s land between the era of austerity and what we hope is a new era of growth. It’s in question because the British right is split. Conservatives cannot win in tough times, or in good times, if they neglect to maintain a broad church.
The former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, the world’s most successful living conservative leader, predicted the split on the right that is now disfiguring British politics when I met him in Sydney in 2006. He warned that Cameron would lose his core supporters if he continued to ignore their concerns about Europe, tax and immigration. This was the period in which Cameron was ruling out unfunded tax cuts, matching Labour’s spending plans, refusing to talk about immigration, rejecting reform of the European Union and opposing grammar schools. We know what happened. Ukip emerged and split the right on a scale not seen before in the postwar period.
Howard’s advice was that while reaching out to floating voters was as important as tending the party base, both needed to be done—and in roughly equal measure. Post-austerity conservatives will be modernisers—modernising the party’s attitude to the future, to government, to the disadvantaged and to the family. They will remember the Churchill of the pre-war period, committed to providing “the finest social ambulance service in the world” as well as ladders of opportunity. But they will not neglect the core centre-right identity of their movements. They will know that expert party management is as important for a successful leader or political project as being good on TV. A house divided against itself can never stand, let alone win difficult, no man’s land elections.
Read YouGov's Peter Kellner on his exclusive new Tory polling for Prospect
