MORI's monthly monitor
The data from MORI's monthly political monitor has been published, here and here.
The first set of data is the leader attributes, which were published in the Observer. The Observer only compared how people saw Brown and how people saw Blair - I said at the time that as far as I knew MORI hadn't yet asked the same questions about David Cameron. In fact they had.
People still have few opinions about Cameron - the only thing that strongly emerged was that 37% ticked "rather inexperienced". Comparing Brown and Cameron there are only a few noticable differences: the two men are both seen as a capable leader by 17% of people, on honesty, being down-to-earth and patriotic there is little difference, the negative attributes of being "rather narrow minded", "tending to talk down to people", "being out of touch" and being "too inflexible" all see Brown score noticably higher than Cameron, more people see Cameron as having lots of personality than do Brown. Brown outscores Cameron on being good in a crisis, having sound judgement and understanding the problems facing Britain and the world. Once again, it is the same old pattern - Cameron beats Brown on "fluffy" attributes like being likeable, in touch, broad minded and so on, but Brown beats Cameron on being seen as effective. The only strong finding on the attributes people associated with Menzies Campbell is that he was seen as more trustworthy than most politicians by 17% of respondents.
The other half of the poll contained leader approval ratings (Cameron and Brown both up slightly, Campbell unchanged), questions on which party is best in different policy areas and voting intention. The issue figures on MORI's site are only for those who said the issues were inportant, but contain some surprising results - amongst those who told MORI that Europe was a very important issue, Labour still led over the Conservatives. Labour have recently led the Conservative on the issue of Europe, but personally I always expected that those people who said Europe was an important issue would tend to be those of a more Euro-sceptic bent - however, those people say they prefer Labour. More surprising still is those people who say they think healthcare is an important issue think that the Conservatives are the best party on the issue. On Labour's trump card of the economy, where recent YouGov polls have shown them losing the lead amongst the public as a whole, they maintain a strong lead amongst those who name the economy as an important issue.
I've left the most surprising figure to last. The Conservatives have led in every opinion poll published since late April (and indeed, still lead in the two opinion polls conducted since MORI completed their fieldwork), but the poll also shows Labour ahead on voting intention. The topline figures, with changes since MORI's last opinion poll, are CON 35%(-1), LAB 36% (+4), LDEM 19% (-5). It goes without saying that the poll appears out of line with all other recent polls (I explored here why I think it is that MORI's polls are quite so volatile). Given MORI's volatility and the fact that both the YouGov poll carried out since, and the Populus poll carried out at the same time, showed movement in the opposite direction, I think this poll is probably the outlier.
