Hugging hoodies, selling peerages and being nice to Bush

I suggested last week that the fall in David Cameron's approval ratings in YouGov's political tracker polls was a result of his "hug-a-hoodie" speech. A poll by Communicate Research in the Independent on Sunday suggests that the speech wasn't entirely without benefit for Cameron - asked if "David Cameron's statement that teenage hoodies need love and understanding made me more likely to vote Conservative", 24% said yes and 69% said no. Of course, on questions like this you really need to give people the option to say that the speech made them less likely to vote Tory, and preferably offer the options of saying that they would vote Tory anyway, or wouldn't vote Tory whatever they did. These 24% could be all staunch Tories anyway, so as it stands the question tells us little.

Communicate also asked about attitudes to sleaze. Unsurprisingly a large majority of people (69%) thought that political parties should not be allowed to give peerages to people who had given them large donations, with 24% of people thinking it was acceptable. Asked if David Cameron or Gordon Brown would be better at rooting out sleaze as Prime Minister the two men were almost exactly neck and neck, with Brown on 34% and Cameron on 33%, suggesting that despite Labour's problems with sleaze we have not yet reached the point where the Conservatives can realistically sell themselves as the cleaner alternative (although it's worth remembering that people do tend to answer questions like this in a partisan manner and, at least in the past, Communicate Research have not weighted their samples politically, leading to polls slightly over-representing the amount of Labour supporters).

Finally Communicate asked about Tony Blair's relationship with President Bush - 50% of people agreed that "Tony Blair's close relationship with President Bush stops Britain playing a more constructive role in the crisis between Israel and its neighbours", with 33% disagreeing, and 54% agreed that "it is fair to describe Tony Blair as George Bush's poodle", with 37% of people disagreeing.

ICM's monthly poll should hopefully be published tomorrow, with YouGov at the end of the week.