While people tend to think that Boris Johnson’s return to Parliament would be good for politics, they narrowly tend to think Nigel Farage’s election would be a bad thing
The past week has seen the commitment by two controversial political figures to running for parliament in the next election: London Mayor Boris Johnson in the Conservative safe seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, and UKIP party leader Nigel Farage in South Thanet. While the media will no doubt welcome the addition of both characters to the ongoing political narrative, voters are more hesitant.
Final numbers are now in, and reveal that voters tend to welcome the return of Boris Johnson by 43% to 24%, while they tend to think of a potential Farage victory in his race to become an MP in 2015 as a bad thing, by the narrower margin of 33% good to 41% bad. The remainder chose either 'neither' or 'don't know'.
Today was also a first outing for 'First Verdict', YouGov's experiment in using a smart-phone app for an instant take on a breaking story (see HERE for more on methodology). The two sets of results tell the same story: both samples clearly favour the Boris return, but the FV result is more pro-Boris. The app sample is a little more urban, and we have decided not to weight FV samples for the time being. It's called 'First Verdict' because it takes an instant opinion snapshot of a breaking story and gives a forecast of the shape of a full poll result; every time we release a 'first verdict' result we will follow up with final numbers within 24 hours.
The Uxbridge Conservatives will announce whether Mr Johnson has been successful on 12th September, but either way he has committed to serving his full term as Mayor. Nigel Farage was formally nominated as UKIP's candidate for South Thanet last night.
