Published
There He Is Again
Britain changes governments, parties, slogans and political tribes. Then the electorate moves again — and somebody asks Sir John Curtice to explain what just happened.
There he is again.
Sir John Curtice.
When he is not explaining one result, another election or poll will soon give him a reason to return.
He’ll be back.
An election. A by-election. A referendum. The next opinion poll that apparently changes everything.
Come hell, rain or shine, somebody in a television studio will eventually turn to Sir John and ask the question Britain has apparently been unable to answer for itself for decades:
So, what does the British public think?
And out come the numbers.
I’ve watched this ritual for years.
I don’t even mean that disrespectfully.
Curtice clearly knows his subject. He’s been contributing to British Social Attitudes since 1986. He’s been analysing elections and public opinion for longer than some of the politicians he’s now analysing have been alive.
In fact, increasingly, I quite look forward to hearing what he’s got to say.
Listening to him analyse Reform and other shifts in party support, I found myself returning to a question about British political commentary more generally.
Are we making the British voter much more complicated than they really are?
Here We Go Again
Survey research can show that support for a party is associated with particular views, experiences and levels of satisfaction. Those patterns matter: a vote is rarely explained by one issue alone.
But describing a group is only the start of the analysis. A set of characteristics can tell us who is more likely to support a party; it cannot, by itself, explain why a person changes their mind or leaves a party they once backed.
That is where the labels begin.
Before long, we’ve constructed an extraordinarily complicated creature called The Reform Voter.
And I’m sitting there thinking:
Haven’t we met this person before?
The Voter Who Voted for Everybody
Imagine someone whose votes have crossed party lines over several elections.
Maybe they voted Labour.
Then Liberal Democrat.
Then UKIP.
Then Brexit.
Then Conservative.
Maybe Labour again.
Perhaps, later, a different party.
Perhaps they’ll vote for somebody completely different next time.
What exactly are they?
Have they undergone six ideological transformations?
Did they wake up one morning socially liberal, become economically conservative by lunchtime, turn populist on Wednesday and discover authoritarianism over the weekend?
Or is there a considerably simpler possibility?
They’re not satisfied.
And they keep looking.
That’s what fascinates me.
Britain keeps analysing where the voter has gone.
I want to know why they keep leaving.
We’ve Been Here Before
Think about the political language that has shaped successive elections.
Every few years Britain acquires another political slogan and another supposedly newly discovered group of voters.
The red wall. The blue wall. The Brexit voter. The Workington Man. The left-behind voter. Now the Reform voter.
And each time we behave as though we’ve discovered something completely new.
But look underneath it.
An awful lot of the same problems.
Maybe Britain Is the Thing We Should Be Studying
This is where I think the endless analysis can become almost absurd.
Not because the polling is worthless.
It isn’t.
Not because Curtice doesn’t understand his numbers.
He plainly does.
But numbers tell you what people said.
They don’t automatically tell you how Britain produced the person answering the question.
People don’t grow up inside polling tables.
They live through governments. They read newspapers. They watch television. They scroll through Facebook. They hear political slogans repeated for months.
They lose jobs. They get pay rises. They watch rents increase. They wait for hospital appointments. They watch their towns change. They hear politicians tell them who is responsible.
Then eventually somebody puts a ballot paper in front of them.
And afterwards we analyse the result as though the voter arrived fully formed from nowhere.
The Distraction Machine
And then there is the media.
Because none of this happens in isolation.
For years, public debate has moved from crisis to crisis and argument to argument.
Europe.
Immigration.
Boats.
Culture wars.
Boris.
Corbyn.
Truss.
Starmer.
Farage.
Some of those questions matter enormously.
But the volume of the political argument can obscure a much simpler test:
Is the country actually getting better?
Are people better housed? Are wages stronger? Are public services better? Is infrastructure improving? Are towns becoming more prosperous? Do people feel more secure?
Do younger people believe they’ll have opportunities their parents had?
Those aren’t particularly sophisticated questions.
Perhaps that’s why they don’t occupy entire election-night graphics packages.
When the Leader Changes
A change of leader can alter how voters see a party. It can bring back people who had drifted away, attract new support or sharpen doubts that were already there.
What happens when the person at the top changes?
It is tempting to treat every movement in support as proof that voters have acquired a new, permanent political identity. Often, the simpler explanation is that some people are willing to take another look.
I’ll have another look.
That is politics: choices remain open, and loyalties can shift.
Popularity eventually meets events. Economic conditions change. Governments make decisions. Voters feel those decisions in their wages, bills, taxes, services and communities.
Then people are asked what they think again. Support can hold, fade or move elsewhere. The answer is something to observe over time, not assume from one snapshot.
That uncertainty is precisely the point.
The Limits of Looking Ahead
This is what really gets me.
We are constantly trying to work out what people’s stated opinions mean for a future election. But a poll is a snapshot of answers given under particular conditions, not a contract for how someone will vote later.
No one can know exactly what the country or its circumstances will look like when voters next make their choice.
What happens if living standards improve?
What happens if they deteriorate?
What happens if unemployment rises?
What happens if the NHS improves?
What happens if immigration falls?
What happens if another crisis changes the public conversation?
What happens if a party disappoints its own supporters?
What happens if a new leader changes how people see a party?
A voter we painstakingly categorise in one survey may have changed their mind by the time of the next election.
And then we’ll need another explanation.
There Will Be Another Voice
One day, presumably, Sir John will decide he’s counted enough British voters.
But no single analyst can interpret public opinion forever.
Britain likes continuity.
We like institutions.
We particularly like familiar people who can explain complicated things in reassuring tones.
Curtice himself has already handed over an institutional role. Professor Jane Green succeeded him as president of the British Polling Council in 2024, after his sixteen years in the post.
And she’s hardly an unknown quantity.
Oxford professor. British Election Study co-director. ITV election analyst.
There is an entire generation of serious researchers already doing this work.
Others will follow them.
So eventually television will find its next great interpreter of the British voter.
Perhaps that’s inevitable.
The British Election Study itself has been examining elections since 1964.
We have decades of data.
Decades of elections.
Decades of increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding what British voters think.
And yet there’s something wonderfully British about the fact that, after all that research, every few years we still appear completely astonished by what British voters do.
Perhaps the Voter Isn’t the Mystery
That’s where I’ve landed.
A party can build a durable ideological constituency. Support can also reflect a temporary alignment of frustration, hope and circumstances.
Maybe someone who supports a party now will keep supporting it for years.
Maybe they’re somewhere else in five.
Maybe a change of leadership has altered a party’s direction.
Maybe that renewed support will fade when governing gets difficult.
We’ll find out.
That’s for the evidence to establish.
But there’s another question that interests me far more.
If somebody has moved between parties across several elections, perhaps the remarkable thing isn’t their latest destination.
It’s that nobody persuaded them to stay.
That’s the bit I think Britain keeps talking around.
We endlessly study the voter.
We classify them.
Segment them.
Poll them.
Give them names.
Put them into electoral tribes.
Then, when they move again, we commission another analysis explaining why.
Meanwhile the country continues underneath them.
The names and circumstances will change. The underlying question remains: what makes people leave one political home and consider another?
One party may gain ground; another may lose it.
A surge in support may become durable. It may disappear as quickly as it arrived.
I don’t know.
There will be speeches, arguments, newspaper front pages, political winners, political losers and, inevitably, another set of polls.
Then somebody will have to explain what the British public makes of it all.
And actually, I’m rather interested to hear what Sir John thinks.
I suspect they’ll give him a call.