From: The Unit To: GB Subject: In-depth polling

So, pretty good week, up to a point. Apologies for the somewhat negative tone of last week's memo. What we all need to remember is that we still have two years to turn things round. Two years is a long time. Certainly from where we're sitting, planning media strategy for you and the government, two years feels like an enormously long period of time. That's nearly 800 days' worth of newspapers to be filled with comment and analysis of your performance.

It's exciting. In some ways, too exciting to think about all at once. The fun of presenting you week in, week out for two years.

The excitement has certainly been getting to some of the team here. We lost another two on Thursday. But really don't think we need to read anything into the haemorrhaging of staff. There's a healthy pile of CVs coming in. Including a guy who's worked on ideas for children's TV shows (although never in a paid role) and a woman who did some work experience on Andrew Neil's programme and said she would be willing to join the party if we compensated her salary to a commensurate figure.

Anyway, in other developments, we've finally got the results through from the private polling we've been conducting. We really weren't sure about sending it through. Particularly during the period when you were eating only Cullen skink soup and communicating with us and your senior staff entirely via Post-it notes stuck to the empty tins.

But now you seem to be back on top of your game and Damian says you talked to him on Thursday, so here are the results we've pulled in:

The headline was that the Tories have a 20-point lead. However, it's not all doom and gloom. When we asked respondents how they would vote if we changed all our policies and appointed an entirely new cabinet, but you still remained in place, it resulted in a statistically insignificant but still very healthy 3-4 per cent poll bump. Food for thought?!

In ratings for the leaders head-to-head you obviously came last. But the disappointing news was that your support has dropped below that of a notional fourth-party "charismatic authoritarian" candidate. There is no positive angle we can think of to this piece of information.

As far as personal values went, Cameron was rated higher than you in terms of presentational abilities, competence and concern about poverty. There was a slight shift to us when we followed up the poverty question with the additional query: "Seriously? No kidding? Cameron? On poverty? Better than Brown? Gordon Brown. From Scotland. Cameron's better? From Eton and corporate PR? No shit? You seriously actually think that?" But there was a certain amount of feeling that the additional question may have had some inadvertent bias built in.

Let us know your thoughts.

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