Poll with Conservatives five points ahead of Labour is first since bombing, but shows other factors such as manifestos are at play

The narrowing of the Conservative lead over Labour to five points in the first opinion poll since the Manchester suicide bombing on Monday punctures the widespread political assumption that the attack would improve the Tories’ standing.

The Times/YouGov poll putting the Conservatives on 43% and Labour on 38% was based on interviews conducted on Wednesday and Thursday, and included the period in which Theresa May declared a critical threat level and announced the deployment of nearly 1,000 troops on to the streets of Britain.

But the reduction in the Tory lead reflects two other polls conducted earlier this week that showed the Conservatives’ “dementia tax” manifesto plan has cut through and hit the party’s ratings. At the same time, Labour’s pledge to scrap tuition fees has proved the most popular policy from its manifesto launch.

It was always going to be the case that the polls would narrow during the course of the campaign, as Labour’s policies received greater media exposure, but the YouGov poll implies that public opinion is more volatile. The Conservative lead in YouGov polls has fallen from 22 points two weeks ago, to nine points last week and now five points.

The Manchester attack seems to have slightly improved May’s personal ratings and caused Jeremy Corbyn’s to dip as the repeated sight of the prime minister addressing the UK from Downing Street after Cobra meetings has dominated the news. In the YouGov poll, May has a 45%-28% advantage over the Labour leader on who makes the best prime minister.

General election 2017 poll tracker: YouGov poll sees Labour five points off Tories Read more

The details of the YouGov poll show May is far more trusted than Corbyn, by 55% to 33%, to make the right decisions to keep Britain safe from terrorism. But despite Manchester being front and centre, and the suspension of election campaigning, people still named Brexit, health and immigration as more important issues facing the country than defence and security.

A breakdown of voters by class shows that the dip in Conservative support has happened among middle-class ABC1 voters, where the Tories’ lead is down to three points, instead of among working-class C2DE voters, where May still has an eight-point advantage.



YouGov’s Anthony Wells said May and the Conservatives had been damaged by the fallout from the manifesto launch, but it was hard to determine the impact of the bombing on the election campaign.

“It has been a highly unusual few days in an election campaign arguably unlike any other in history,” Wells said. “There is no way of guessing what will happen in the two weeks to polling day, but we will be able to be more confident about how voting intention settles down over the next few days.”

He is right to be cautious. Three weeks before the 2015 election, YouGov published a poll giving Ed Miliband’s Labour a lead of 35% to 34% over David Cameron’s Conservatives, but Labour lost the vote.

There are some precedents. It was thought at the time that the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox during the EU referendum campaign last year would strengthen the remain campaign, but this did not prove to be the case.

In the recent French presidential election, it was assumed that the killing of a police officer on the Champs-Élysées in Paris days before the first round, which was claimed by Islamic State, would benefit the far-right Marine Le Pen, but again this did not happen.

It is only one poll, but it shows that public opinion is perhaps in a more unpredictable state than many assumed early in the campaign, when the collapse of Ukip fuelled a Tory surge in the polls.