Ed bounces back: State of the party – July 2011

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

Ed Miliband may have reached his nadir as Labour leader at the end of last month – when 53% of you said that he was doing a poor or very poor job – but he has bounced back in spectacular fashion thanks to his handling of the News International scandal.

59% of you believe that Ed has done an Excellent or Good job (up from just 22% last month), while only 20% believe that he has performed poorly or very poorly (down from 53% just a month ago). It seems that the views of LabourList readers have been turned on their heads by the events of the past few weeks. As you can see, that has had quite a profound impact upon our graph (below). 85% of you believe that Ed handled phone hacking to an Excellent or Good standard, which has clearly been responsible for the upswing in support for the Labour leader.

Bounce back

The “feel-good factor” is felt further “down the ticket”, with most shadow cabinet members rated more highly this month than they were last month. The usual suspects (Balls, Cooper and Burnham) take the three top spots, but no shadow cabinet members are now viewed more negatively than positively (compared to two last month), and some members of the shadow cabinet (most notably Hilary Benn and John Denham) have seen an upswing in support. Perhaps surprisingly, there hasn’t been much of a boost for shadow culture secretary Ivan Lewis though.

We also asked you if there’s a progressive majority in the country, and 44% of you said yes, and we’ve had hundreds of questions submitted for Labour’s new General Secretary – we’ll be putting some of them to Iain in the coming weeks.

An additional question this month was to discover the Labour MP who had impressed you the most in July. Tomorrow we’ll be revealing who has been chosen as the inagural LabourList “MP of the month” – the lucky MP will receive a certificate, and (hopefully) a warm fuzzy feeling.

517 LabourList readers voted in the survey, which ran from Thursday 28th July – Monday 1st August. Thanks to all who took part. You can see the full breakdown of results here.