YouGov's latest poll for the Daily Telegraph, which is beginning a week-long series of reports on the Conservative Party, contains mixed news for David Cameron. He has made much progress in removing many of the reasons millions of voters had for years for not voting Conservative; but he still has work to do to make voters positively support him.
Two years ago just 26% thought his Tory party 'reflect the values and aspirations of the British people better than they used to', while far more, 45%, considered this not to be true. Our latest figures show a marked change: true, 39%, untrue 38%. Among Tory voters barely half thought this was true two years ago; that figure has now jumped to four out of five.
Tory voters are also shedding their doubts about Mr Cameron's commitment to the party's traditional principles. Two years ago 37% thought he had 'wrongly abandoned' them. That proportion is now just 13%. The overall level of Tory support in our latest poll, 40%, may not be quite as high as Cameron would like; but that 40% looks less flaky than it did in his first two years as party leader.
There is also widespread agreement with Mr Cameron's critique of Britain under Labour. Three in four think Britain is a 'broken society'; and as many as 46% apply that label to their own local area.
Yet only a minority of voters have a clear idea what Mr Cameron would do to tackle Britain's problems. A majority, 55%, say 'it's hard to know what the Conservative Party stands for at the moment' (down only modestly from the 63% registered two years ago), while 64% agree that 'David Cameron talks a good line but it is hard to know whether there is any substance behind the words' (little changed: two years ago the figure was 65%).
These doubts feed through to expectations of how a Conservative government would perform. Asked what life in Britain would be like after four or five years of Tory rule, just 20% think living standards would be higher, 19% think school standards would be higher, 17% think the NHS would provide better care, 20% think crime would be lower and 7% think the 'taxes paid by people like you as a share of total income' would be lower.
In part, these figures clearly reflect the condition of Britain's public finances in the current recession; however, Mr Cameron should be concerned that twice as many people think his priority would be to reduce the government deficit as think it would be to maintain the quality of front-line public services. And he should also be worried that more people think he would govern in the interests of better-off people (45%) thank think he would govern in the interests of the country as a whole (38%).
A further potential problem is that the people's economic priorities appear to be closer to the Government's than the Conservatives'. If a Tory government needed to take tough measures are needed to reduce government borrowing, 69% of the general public, and 63% of Tories, think one of the top priorities should be to raise the taxes of those earning more than £150,000 a year. The next two favoured options are: reduce welfare benefits such as jobseekers' allowance and invalidity benefits (backed by 37% of the public), and postponing the planned reduction in inheritance tax (36%).
Asked about non-economic priorities, 59% back a reduction in immigration, 47% want bankers' bonuses to be limited by law, and 39% want British troops withdrawn from Afghanistan. A mere 3% think it should be a priority to repeal the ban on fox-hunting.
At present, the Conservatives appear to be on course for a modest overall majority. If they can enhance the positives, they could win big. But there remain enough weaknesses in their image for the party to be vulnerable to an effective fightback by Labour.
