Um, as he's been passing off all of your ideas as his own, you can peer review what James just said.

[laughs] Yeah, no, that, that's a very good summary of the, uh, the discussion we had last night.

I think, I think it's completely true, and that's the point which whenever I'm asked about this polling, and in- indeed whenever something's been published about this polling that is consistently made, is that we are operating in a vacuum of any sort of stay out or, or sort of don't rejoin campaign there.

I would say there's, like, a flip side to the flip side though.

Let's imagine that we are in a situation where there is a campaign on rejoining the European Union, and there is therefore a campaign against it.

I think that campaign starts off in a very, very difficult position because, yes, of course, the more trade-offs you put into this and the more you kind of probe public opinion on the actual sort of ins and outs of European Union membership, that gets trickier.

But on the fundamental question of has Brexit been a good or a bad thing, the public are very, very set in the idea that it's been bad, and it wasn't a good idea.

Um, why, why are you interested in how many parties sit in the lower chamber of the Spanish parliament?

Where are the Tories and does it match the mood here?

Fantastic.

I get the nice, easy opener.

So the Conservative Party right now are a little bit below the drubbing that they got in 2024.

That is the state of play at the minute.

Our latest polling has them at around about 20% of vote intention among British adults.

They are behind Labour quite significantly in that regard, sort of around and about where Reform UK are.

It feels like Camille Bain-Noque is sort of speaking to that, but without giving any concrete resolution.

[laughs]

... presentation of polling data.

Hello, John.

Good morning.

Um, so I think the, the, the polling that we've done with the IFG, which will be of course available immediately after this, uh, uh, event, if you'd like to see the slides which I'm about to read off, please do just drop me a line, uh, uh, or anybody at the IFG and we will circulate them.

And tables will be up, John, don't worry, on the website, uh, later today.

So I think there are three key focuses here to the polling.

Um, so I'm, uh, very interested in your far more expert than mine professional opinion on what that might mean for, for formation of government and, and so on.

So explain your methodology for extra marks.

Three workings out, indeed.

So what we did is we polled over 6,000 adults across the country and we split them into three random groups.

And one random group saw a question which simply asked, do you approve or disapprove of the government's record to date? And then we get the net figure, which is the people who say they approve minus people who disapprove.

And that figure was minus 36.

So substantially more people saying they disapprove of the government's record than approve.

Another random third saw the question thinking about the Labour government to date since they took power in July 2024.

And then the inverse is true, that actually if it looks like you're not where the show is anymore, just the attention drifts away from you.

Do the two parties of the right fight each other or just concentrate their firepower on the left? What, what can you see from your data is the lesson that parties on the right need to draw?

Yes and no.

I think Hampshire is a, is a great example of what that looks like in the aggregate, and is part of the reason why we polled it and why we published it, is it, is to go back to the, the 2021 point, it is a council that was last fought in 2021.

The Conservatives did very well.

Uh, what we think we are seeing there is a 30-point drop in the Conservative support, and about a 30-point rise in Reform UK's support.

Uh, so basically transferring votes from one party to the other.

The party in second, the Liberal Democrats, staying exactly where they are, and it's, could be the case that owing to the distribution of those votes in Hampshire, perhaps Liberal Democrats end up being the largest party.

Maybe, you know, they're gonna pick up voters from very different backgrounds who've just sort of had enough for other reasons, or are we seeing anything that you think could be just a, a micro-trend to watch?