New voting intention polls from Opinium and Deltapoll

Two voting intention polls in the Sunday papers. Deltapoll in the Mail on Sunday had CON 42%, LAB 38%, LDEM 6% (report here). Opinium in the Observer has CON 39%, LAB 42%, LDEM 5% (report here).

I expect rather more attention will be given to the poll from Opinium as the Labour lead is the first we’ve seen since July 2019. We’ve had a couple of polls showing the main parties neck-and-neck in recent weeks (there was another one yesterday from Redfield & Wilton, showing them both at 40%). Looking across the various polls it is clear that the two main parties were heading towards roughly equal levels of support and, therefore, normal margin of error was going to spit out a Labour lead soon enough.

The question is what impact this starts to have upon the political environment – assuming the pattern continues – voting intention polls this far out have little predictive value (4 years to go!), but do have an influence on how the parties are perceived to be doing by their own supporters, their own MPs and the media. It helps Keir Starmer to be seen as a winner, who has put the Labour party back into the lead. It risks doing the opposite for Boris Johnson, especially given one of his selling points to the Tory party was his popularity with the public.