Why a Mail on Sunday poll was a catalogue of blunders

“EXCLUSIVE: Keir Starmer will be out of No. 10 within a year, poll predicts,” roared the front page of the Mail on Sunday on January 5, with deputy political editor Anna Mikhailova reporting that voters had delivered a “damning verdict on PM amid anger over migration, winter fuel payments and inheritance tax on farmers”.

Big news alright – and only slightly undermined by the fact that, er, the “bombshell poll” said nothing of the sort.

The actual percentage of those polled by Delta on behalf of the newspaper saying they expected Starmer to be out of Downing Street within a year was 31%, which maths fans will note is considerably short of a majority. It means that contrary to the front page, 69% of voters were actually predicting that Starmer would not be out of No.10 in a year – not much of a headline, really.

And in terms of voting intentions, the figures showed Labour on 30% compared to the Conservatives’ 23% and Reform’s 22% – a seven-point lead not too shabby considering that Mikhailova claims “speculation mounts in Westminster over Sir Keir’s future after a dismal start to his premiership”.

In addition, on the question of ‘which party is best to deal with the following’, Labour was ahead among voters on the cost of living, NHS and the small boats ‘crisis’ which the Mail on Sunday serves up to its readers on a weekly basis.

And it also claims that “in news that will worry both Labour and the Conservatives, one in five voters thinks that Nigel Farage will be Britain’s next prime minister”, although it might also delight both parties that a considerably healthier four in five think he won’t.

Still at least there was at least one Labour MP prepared to back up the Mail on Sunday’s findings, albeit anonymously. “There never was much support for Keir,” one tells Mikhailova. “But after a catalogue of blunders – from scrapping winter fuel payments to hiking taxes – what little support there was for the prime minister has collapsed.”

And we know said MP must exist – because one phrase absolutely, definitely used by people who aren’t tabloid hacks is “catalogue of blunders”!