Is this a reaction to the Robinson programme?

The latest daily poll from the YouGov panel has the Lib Dems down to one of their lowest shares in a long time - just 12 points.

I wonder whether this is in part a reaction to the big political story on Friday, when the fieldwork was taking place, of the Nick Robinson BBC TV programme about how the coalition came about.

It should be said that that YouGov has proved to be (see table below) the most volatile pollster when it comes to the third party. In the three years before the election it had shares ranging from 11% - 34% and it was the only one of the mainstream firms to have it ahead of both the Tories and Labour.

Clegg and his team will, no doubt, point to the vast gap between the YouGov numbers and those from ICM only a few days ago when the party share was put at 19%.

I’m hoping that we’ll see a survey in the next day or so from one of the phone pollsters that finished in the top half of the 2010 polling table. Will that back YouGov up?

If it does and that follows through to the conference season then it will make life even more uncomfortable for the yellows.

Polling the LD 2005 - 2010

Mike Smithson

Is the coalition impacting on newspaper readership?

Above are the June newspaper circulations figures and again we see the continued erosion in sales at the so called “quality end” of the market.

This seems to be the same story every month though June, the first full month after the election and the formation of the coalition, seems to have produced bigger than usual year on falls particularly for the Guardian and the Telegraph.

A random thought is that at the election these two papers backed one of the parties in the coalition yet the outcome for each is not what they wanted.

The Guardian endorsed the Lib Dems only to find a few days later that their chosen party was doing a deal with the blues. The Telegraph gave their traditional support to the blues and now find a government where other influencers are in play.

Is the Guardian, I wonder, now finding it harder to hang on to its Lib Dem readership while the Telegraph is having a similar problem with Cameron loyalists.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it - but the big picture does not look good for almost the entire quality press.

Mike Smithson

Do Dave’s trips indicate a big change of emphasis?

July’s been a busy month for David Cameron on the foreign affairs front with visits to the United States, Turkey and most recently, India. In all three, he’s been effusive towards his hosts and strongly positive about relations between Britain and the countries he’s been in. That’s all par for the course in diplomacy. What’s much less so is the strength of his criticism directed elsewhere: implicitly towards France and Germany for blocking Turkey’s application to join the EU, and overtly towards Israel over Gaza and Pakistan over terrorism.

There are of course various different games all going on at once here. The point about Turkey’s membership is in part the kind of tactical positioning that often goes on in the EU, ensuring that someone else takes the blame for blocking reform or development. It’s also about frustrating federalist ambitions.

Taken together though, there’s a strong indication that the government is looking to significantly refocus Britain’s foreign policy priorities, away from the legacy of the second half of the 20th century and towards the expected developments of the 21st.

Despite his ‘junior partner’ comments, it’s notable that various members of the government have been quite firm on seeing 2015 as a deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan (which is, it has to be said, well over a decade after the 9/11 attacks), a timeline which looks independent of American priorities. It’s difficult to imagine Tony Blair making that kind of remark or being so outspoken about Israel’s actions in Gaza (something that will also have been noticed across the Atlantic).

The criticism of elements of the Pakistani authorities for their ambiguous attitude towards terrorist elements in their country ties in with the Afghanistan situation but also contrasts both with his statements in Turkey - a very different kind of Islamic country - and the regional superpower, India. It’s not difficult to see what the increasingly important relationships of tomorrow are seen as being.

Those relationships are with the rising powers where there should be some degree of affinity and shared interest. Turkey and India are, unusually for their regions, both democracies, both relatively secular, both growing economically, both have geopolitical instability and threats on their doorstep and both are big - if it joined, Turkey may have the biggest population in the EU within 20 years; India has comfortably more people than the EU and USA put together.

All this isn’t to say that the old priorities will no longer be seen as important. For one thing, there’s the geographic fact that the UK is a European and Atlantic country. For another, the EU, NATO and historic ties aren’t going to simply disappear. Even so, the visits and the (un)diplomatic language suggest at least a loosening of those old alliances in favour of a more multi-tiered approach. Not before time, some will say. Perhaps so, but difficult and potentially dangerous manoeuvring which will call for careful handling at high levels, especially when there are already more than enough obstacles to trip up the government on the home front.

David Herdson

YouGov in the 2007 Deputy race

The above shows the YouGov projections and the actual first round shares in the final YouGov poll before the 2007 Labour deputy race.

As can be seen the big variance was in the union section with the John Cruddas numbers. This was felt at the the time to be down to the timing on the fieldwork - taking before the only TV debate and before the main union had sent out supporting material in their publications for Cruddas.

He was the only one who was not a minister and had a lower public profile.

In the members section YouGov did pretty well with the big exception of the large overstatement of the Hillary Benn figures.

A big difference between 2007 and now is that was a contest for deputy - this is for leader. Turnout is likely to be much higher particularly within the union sections which could have a big influence.

Mike Smithson