"I'm ready to hit the ground from day one"
The much-mocked and now deleted tweet by the UK's latest prime minister, Liz Truss, has turned out to be far more prophetic than even her harshest critics could probably have imagined.
The headline story dragging the Truss government rapidly down to earth has been the catastrophic mini-budget announced by chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng - one which led to the pound tanking, a rebuke from the IMF and corrective measures from the Bank of England to cushion the impact. Following her subsequent u-turn on removing the 45p tax rate, Truss now finds herself in a very difficult position. With dissent now growing louder from within her party and, outside the walls of the Conservative Party Conference, a Labour party with a record lead in the polls, the pressure is really on.
As figures from a new YouGov survey show, the new Conservative leader, voted into Downing Street by tory party members, is struggling to find support from any group of voters. Her net favourability score (favourable views minus unfavourable) among all adults is -59 percent (14 percent minus 73 percent). Her best bet is predictably with those that voted Conservative in 2019, but even there a net score of -30 percent does not bode well for the underfire PM. In contrast, the Labour leader Keir Starmer (hardly known for high levels of popularity himself), is currently faring significantly better, as our infographic illustrates.
