Nigel Farage has loomed in Britain’s public consciousness for a decade now. Ukip burst onto the scene during the coalition years. The party polled in the low-teens, while Farage’s personal numbers reached about 40 per cent on average. But few saw him as prime minister material – only 8 per cent considered him appropriate for the role in 2014.
Not the case anymore. In a three-way poll, 30 per cent of us want Farage as PM, compared to 33 per cent for Keir Starmer. Kemi Badenoch? It almost feels cruel to report (16 per cent).
This is the mood music for a Tory leader as redundant to the conversation as the Lib Dems in 2005. An option, but not a very profitable one.
Leading all of this is a certain tolerance of Farage from voters you would otherwise expect to reject him. Farage has his detractors, but it’s not that emphatic among the young. Britain Elects finds that Farage is polling at 33 per cent with the over 50s. Among the under 50s, it is not much lower at 30 per cent.
But are we sure this is right? My tracker accounts for every poll going, and the variation between pollsters raises question marks. YouGov, for instance, finds that the under 50s feel negatively toward Farage by 70 per cent. With Opinium, that’s around 42 per cent, but YouGov regularly finds more negative numbers for all politicians.
It all raises a question about whether we are sampling young(ish) people properly. Younger voters have often be far more liberal than their older counterparts (though the strength of that trend has frayed in recent years). But this would imply that the Farage-antipathy in YouGov’s sample may be a result of loud, not majority, voices.
In July last year there were fewer pollsters tracking attitudes to Farage than there are today. What we might be seeing here is less a dramatic change, but rather more pollsters tracking his popularity. However, that doesn’t deny that to whatever degree, attitudes to the Reform leader have softened.
[See also: The new Green Party leader will shape Britain’s future]
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