Poll reveals what Britons think of Johnson as PM
More than half of Britons feel that Boris Johnson has performed badly as the country’s prime minister, a new Ipsos UK poll has revealed. The latest poll comes amid the ongoing Partygate scandal cloud over the Johnson government.
According to the survey, which was conducted online on February 9 and 10, 54% of respondents believe that Johnson “has done a bad job as Prime Minister to date,” and only 29% of respondents feel he has done a good job. For comparison, in February last year, 37% believed that Johnson was a good head of government, with 41% saying he was a bad prime minister.
“This decline in his ratings is also observed among 2019 Conservative voters. Half (54%) still believe he has performed well as prime minister, but this is down from seven in ten (69%) last February. Meanwhile, the proportion saying he has done a bad job has nearly doubled (going from 15% to 29%),” the poll researchers said.
The bad news for the prime minister is not limited to these numbers. Some 56% of the 2,038 respondents who took part in the survey said they support Tory MPs who are trying to trigger a vote of no confidence in Johnson, while only 24% expressed their disagreement with the idea.
Commenting on the findings, Director of Politics at Ipsos UK Keiran Pedley said that Johnson’s personal poll ratings continue to weaken and “what happens next will likely be decided by events, as police investigations draw to a close and other items move up the news agenda.”
Scotland Yard is currently investigating a number of alleged lockdown rule-breaking social events at Downing Street. A recent report by top civil servant Sue Gray into some of the allegations found “failures of leadership and judgment” in both Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, but stopped short of directly accusing the prime minister of misconduct. Johnson apologized in parliament following the publication of Gray’s report, but said he would not resign.
Despite a rising number of Conservative MPs filing letters of no-confidence in him to the chair of the 1922 Committee – the parliamentary body of the Tory party – Johnson has reportedly told his colleagues that he intends to fight to continue in his current post.
