ComRes poll on alternate Labour leaders

As soon as there is a leadership crisis in a party, it is only a matter of time before the "how would you vote if X was leader questions" come along. Bang on time they have arrived, with ComRes providing the goods for tomorrow's Independent.

Now, poll questions like this are an interesting beast. In my opinion they are both of very little use in actually showing how popular leaders would be, but at the same time of massive importance. The first part is because the public are firstly very poor at predicting how they will respond to future events, and secondly know very little about the potential alternate candidates. Even if they are quite well known, like Jack Straw, no one has any clue what Jack Straw would do as leader, what policies he would champion and so on. Anyway, more about leadership polls in general here.

If they are of such limited use, why do I say they are so important? Well, even though I don't put much weight in them, lots of MPs do. Until now no poll has ever shown an alternate leader doing much better than Gordon Brown, so Brown's supporters can justifiably say to rebel Labour MPs that there is no evidence that any alternate leader would do any better than Brown. The ComRes poll changes that.

ComRes's normal voting intention question, with changes from their last poll, has shares of CON 38%(+8), LAB 22%(nc), LDEM 20%(+2). It was conducted between the 5th and 7th June, so after the local election results were out and James Purnell has resigned, but before the European election results. On the face of it, it shows a large increase in Conservative support, but I'd pay that little heed: the previous ComRes poll was that freaky one showing the Conservatives down at 30%, almost certainly a rogue poll.

ComRes went on to ask how people would vote if other people were Labour leader. These showed Alan Johnson cutting the Conservative lead to 10 points, Jack Straw to 11 points, David Miliband to 12 points, Ed Balls and Jon Cruddas to 14 points. Harriet Harman would produce a 16 point Tory lead, and James Purnell a 17 point Tory lead.

Now, for various reasons these figures are not actually comparable to normal voting intentions. Firstly each was prompted with just the name of the hypothetical Labour leader, not the names of David Cameron and Nick Clegg (and to be entirely fair, they should be compared to a question asking specifically about Labour led by Brown). More importantly none took into account likelihood to vote, so we don't know if any would make Labour voters more or less likely to back their party, only whether they make people actually switch.

For those reasons and the ones I mentioned at the start of the article, I don't think they tell us much at all about how well all these people would actually do as Labour leader. It doesn't really matter though, since it provides Brown's critics with something they can point at as showing that alternate leaders would do better than him.