In an election whose outcome is as uncertain as this one, it makes sense to look ahead, and get a sense of what Party members think about David Cameron’s future.
There are four main possibilities post-election: that the Conservatives win outright, that Labour do so, or that either party is the largest one in a hung Parliament.
To try to get a more full picture of what respondents believe, we have asked whether Cameron should stay or go as leader in the following scenarios.
This last finding can be interpreted in several ways. It can be claimed that it shows the natural loyalty of Party members to their leader during a tight election. You can argue that Cameron’s position as Party leader would be unsustainable with over two in five members opposed to him continuing in such a circumstance…or you can argue the opposite, since over half favour him staying. You can even maintain that, in this eventuality, his support would harden.
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I’m sorry that these questions are not symmetrical. Were this to be the case, we would have asked for Party members’ views in the event of Labour winning a majority, and the Conservatives being the biggest party and forming a government – six questions in all, which would have been neater.
None the less, there is no great mystery about what the general shape of the answers to those questions would have been. In our poll, support for Cameron as Party leader maxes out if the Tories win outright and is presumably at its lowest if Labour wins outright – below, surely, the 30 per cent we found in answer to question two.
Similarly, support for him staying if the Conservatives are the largest party and form the government – but have no majority – would presumably have been below 97 per cent and above 82 per cent.
It may be objected that some Party member respondents might, in some circumstances, want Cameron to quit as Party leader but stay on as Prime Minister were he to occupy the post again post-May 7. However, I think this view is a bit clever-clever: quitting as the first, in this eventuality, would surely entail quitting as the second.
Over a thousand Party members responded to the survey, and only two of them skipped this question. They evidently view it as being very live. The survey is tested against a control panel which was supplied by YouGov.