The Liz Truss era is off to quite the disquieting start.
According to a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll released Monday, Britain's new prime minister has a net approval rating of negative 61 percent, down 13 percentage points from a similar poll last Thursday. Only 9 percent of respondents approve of her overall performance, while 70 percent disapprove.
Truss is underwater even within her own party, with 67 percent of 2019 Conservative voters disapproving of her performance. "Among those who would vote Conservative now, her net approval is -15 percent," R&WS notes.
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Meanwhile, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is seeing a bump in his approval rating, which jumped 3 points from last Thursday to a net positive 8 percent, R&WS reports. Starmer also leads Truss "by 47 points on who would be the better prime minister at this moment — larger than any lead Starmer had held over [former Prime Minister Boris Johnson] before Johnson resigned."
Truss was named Conservative Party leader and the next U.K. prime minister in early September, following an internal party election in which she prevailed over former finance minister Rishi Sunak. She replaced the outgoing Johnson, who stepped down in the wake of numerous scandals, including the COVID-19 protocol-flaunting controversy known as "partygate." And though many expected the start of Truss' term to be turbulent, "few were prepared" for her policies to, after just six weeks, trigger a "financial crisis, emergency central bank intervention, multiple U-turns, and the firing of her Treasury chief," writes The Associated Press.
The poll was conducted Oct. 16 among a sample of 2,000 eligible voters, and its margin of error for the full sample is ± 2.19 percentage points, with a 95 percent confidence interval.
