Britain’s newly minted Prime Minister Liz Truss is already the most unpopular UK political leader in the history of polling.
The UK is currently awash with a wide variety of political polls — a number of which seemingly contradict each other — as publications chart what appears to be the terminal decline of the Truss premiership, despite the former Lib-Dem politician being less than two months in the job.
This article comes with a health warning, however. While pollsters are slowly getting better at tracking the public mood in the UK after their failures to understand the Brexit and post-Brexit mood of the country, certain specifics remain difficult. Continued polling shocks worldwide point to a continued crisis in the industry.
Nevertheless, despite the degree to which they may be totally accurate, present polling in the UK certainly seems to agree that the new Prime Minister Liz Truss is having a hard time. According to a report by POLITICO, four in five British adults now have an unfavourable view of the Prime Minister, with Truss’ net favorability resting at negative 70 per cent, seemingly as a result of the premier’s botched handling of her tax-cutting economic plan.
Such a figure is reportedly the lowest ever recorded by YouGov, standing 17 points below Boris Johnson’s worst-ever approval rating of negative 53 per cent. Some 10 per cent of UK adults said they have a favourable view of the newly appointed Prime Minister, the poll claims.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party as a whole does not appear to be doing much better, with one particularly dire poll predicting that, if a general election was held today, the Conservative Party would hand a landslide 507 seat majority to the Labour party.
To make matters even worse, with it being expected that the Tories would lose 317 of their 365 seats should such an election come to pass, the party would not even be able to hold onto the leader of the opposition spot currently occupied by Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer.
Instead, the separatist Scottish National Party would be expected to end up as the second largest party in the lower house, granting the party’s parliamentary group leader, Ian Blackford, to ask six questions to the Prime Minister every Wednesday during Prime Ministers Questions, with whoever is left leading the Tories left only being allowed to ask two.
Not all predictions are quite so dire, however, with The Guardian reporting last Sunday on an Opinium poll which seems to indicate that the Tories would lose a slightly less apocalyptic 219, which, while enough to lose them the election, would allow them to continue on as the main opposition party in Britain.
This is likely to be little consolation to many in the Conservative Party, however, with many within the party both inside and outside parliament having already turned on the premier with the aim of seeing her replaced by someone else.
55 per cent of members within the party now reportedly think it is time for Truss to resign as Prime Minister according to Sky News, with Boris Johnson of all candidates being earmarked as the overall party favourite to take over from his own replacement.
Despite his relative popularity — or relative lack of unpopularity, depending on one’s perspective — with those within the Conservative Party’s parliamentary group having far more say in who becomes Prime Minister than the political organisation’s rank-and-file, it appears likely that another compromise candidate will instead be appointed to the position if Truss is outed.
The likes of World Economic Forum-linked Rishi Sunak, transgenderism advocate Penny Mordaunt and Chinese Communist Party-linked Jeremy Hunt have all been floated as possible candidates whom MPs would likely rather see as premier over Johnson.
Other possible candidates for the top job from outside the main pack include the likes of former Health Minister Sajid Javid — who famously pushed a journalist into taking a COVID jab live on air — as well as Ben Wallace, who currently serves as the UK’s Defence Secretary.
Ultimately though, the merits of replacing Truss as Prime Minister is questionable for many within the party, with the appointment of the aforementioned Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor of the Exchequer already representing a significant handover of power from the pro-Brexit Truss faction to the more globalist-leaning faction within the party.