Keiran Pedley

Keiran Pedley is Director of Politics at Ipsos MORI.

Thursday

Keiran Pedley

How Farage can win power

There can be no doubt that Nigel Farage was one of the big political winners of 2024. His decision to lead Reform UK into the general election shaped the campaign and was a significant factor in the scale of the Conservative defeat. Reform won more than four million votes and polls suggest they have gained further support since, raising the real possibility that they could replace the Conservative party as the primary voice of small ‘c’ conservative Britain. Nigel Farage and his party have several things going for them. Number one is that immigration continues to be a key issue for the British public. We know that immigration and asylum were key issues that drove 2019 Conservative voters – and others – into the Reform column last July.

Monday

Keiran Pedley

Could Scotland decide the election result?

The starting gun for the general election has been fired. This 2019 parliament is over and we will have a new government in Westminster in six weeks’ time. There have been many significant political inflection points this parliament. Partygate of course. The departure of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss’s brief period as Prime Minister. Arguably as important as any of this is the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon in March 2023. Since her surprise departure from Scottish politics, it is worth dwelling on just how far the SNP have fallen.  At the 2019 general election, they won 45 per cent of the vote and 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats. At the height of the pandemic, more than seven in ten Scots were satisfied with the job Nicola Sturgeon was doing as First Minister.

Sunday

Keiran Pedley

How bad are the polls for Boris Johnson?

It’s no secret that the polls do not look good for the Prime Minister at the moment. The most recent Ipsos Mori political monitor, released this week, shows that seven in ten Britons are now dissatisfied with the job Boris Johnson is doing. The PM’s numbers now are similar to Theresa May’s just before she left office in 2019, Tony Blair’s in January 2007 and the types of figures registered by Gordon Brown throughout 2008 and 2009. In this context, some six in ten Britons think the Conservatives should change their leader before the next general election (up from 42 per cent last July), including more than one in three Conservative voters. Johnson’s struggles appear to be having a real impact on wider public perceptions of the Conservatives too.