YouGov's October Poll
YouGov's monthly poll for the Telegraph has topline figures, with changes since the YouGov poll for the Mirror a fortnight ago, of CON 42%(nc), LAB 33%(-1), LDEM 15%(+1).
The Lib Dems are marginally up, Labour marginally down, but shifts of a single point are insignificant: as with ComRes earlier this week this is a "no change" poll. That in itself is interesting, since we've had two shifts in the political scene that could potentially have made a difference to the picture - firstly there has been a return to "normal politics", with subjects other than the economy sneaking onto the news agenda, and secondly the affair of George Osborne and the Russian billionaire (of course, theoretically both these things could have happened and cancelled one another out!).
Looking at the underlying figures in the poll, the picture is pretty mixed. I've highlighted in recent weeks the constrast between questions asking which party people trust most on the economy, and which they trust to deal with the economic crisis right now. Here we get both questions. Labour have a narrow 1 point lead on being the party people would trust to get us out the present crisis, but asked which party they trust on the economy in general the Conservatives continue to lead by 34% to 30%.
Brown is still considered to have handled the crisis well by a narrow plurality of people (48%), with 45% thinking he has handled it badly. Worse is that now more people (27%) are saying their opinion of Brown has gone down in recent weeks than up (21%). Even so, while people might say their opinion of Brown hasn't risen, his approval ratings in all the polls in recents months speaks for itself (I haven't seen the figures in this one yet, but I'd be amazed if they weren't up from the pre-crisis figures!)
YouGov also asked about George Osborne and Peter Mandleson and both are damned by the public, albeit it appears that Mandleson has come off marginally worse - 63% think his behaviour was "wrong and also very foolish" compared to 53% for Osborne.
