A year after landslide, poll makes grim reading for Starmer
First the caveats. This is just one poll, albeit a large one. And a poll is just a snapshot of current opinion. With an election still four years off much can, and probably will, change.
Yet as Sir Keir Starmer marks one year in power next week, he might well reflect on two things that YouGov's findings highlight.
• Reform would be largest party if general election held today
The first is obvious: how quickly his party has squandered the support it won in its landslide election victory.
But the second is more important: how utterly fragmented Britain's political landscape has become.
Here, it is worth a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment it is 2029 and the results of the general election mirror YouGov's poll.
Reform might be the largest party but it is still 55 seats short of an overall majority. The party's best option would be to try to do a deal with the Conservatives, but would the Tories really want to go into power with Nigel Farage as prime minister and a cabinet in which the vast majority had never been MPs before, let alone ministers?
They might wisely decide to sit it out in the hope of an implosion and an equally improbable swing of the electoral pendulum back to them.
But even if they did agree to prop up Farage, the two parties together would still only have 317 MPs, the same number of seats which the Conservatives alone won under Theresa May back in 2017 — only this time there are not currently enough Democratic Unionist MPs to get them over the magic 326 threshold in the Commons.
Farage might be in Downing Street but he would be on shakier ground than any prime minister in modern political history.
• Fraser Nelson essay: Prime Minister Farage was once unthinkable — not any more
The picture on the left is bleaker still. Even a rainbow coalition of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Welsh and Scottish nationalists would not be enough to sustain a government majority.
To achieve that, the rump of the Tories would have to throw their weight behind Starmer in a German-style coalition.
In short, it is hard to see a plausible and sustainable government of any kind being formed given where public opinion is at the moment.
Supporters of Britain's first-past-the-post system have long argued that its principal benefit, compared with proportional systems widely used on the Continent, is that while it might be unfair, it does at least tend to produce stable governments.
This poll, and the fragmentation of politics that it shows, demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case. Britain could become just as ungovernable as other countries we used to like to joke about.
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