The end of the recession

At the end of last year I wrote a piece saying I thought there were four "known unknowns" that might change the political picture before the election campaign. The first was Labour's final chance to change their leader in January - as we've seen, there was an attempt by Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt to force Brown out, but it fell flat and does not appear to have had any lasting effect upon the polls.

The second was the end of the recession and, as expected, this morning's economic figures show Britain's economy is officially growing again. So, what impact will this have on the polls and will it produce any sort of Labour recovery?

Polls asking if people are more likely to vote Labour if the economy recovers don't predict any significant advance - but I wouldn't take them as a particularly good indicator anyway. If Labour do recover on the back of the economic good news I suspect it won't be on the back of a direct conscious calculation that they have done well and deserve support (we saw with ICM's poll for Channel 4 yesterday that a relatively small proportion of people attribute the recover to government action). Rather it will be a more subconscious increase in optimism and the "feel good factor", leading people to think better of the way the country is going and more likely to back the government.

That said, it's not actually a given that it will be a positive for the government. In ICM's marginals poll last weekend we saw that one area where Gordon Brown still had much better ratings than David Cameron was handling a crisis. Populus's poll this month asked a pair of questions they've used several times since the credit crunch - asking who would make the best Prime Minister "right now, to deal with Britain's economy in recession" and who would make the best Prime Minister going forward after the election - Cameron's lead over Brown was 11 points on the first question, but 17% on the latter. If Gordon Brown is actually still benefitting by being seen as the best man to lead the country in an economic crisis, the passing of that crisis could, perversely, be a negative for him.

We shall see when the first post-recession polls begin arriving.