Christmas with Bojo or Corbyn? No contest!

WITH 19 days until polling day, there is still no sign of the Labour surge which started at this point in the 2017 Election and wiped out Theresa May’s majority.

Today’s Mail on Sunday Deltapoll gives Boris Johnson a 13-point lead, with the Tories on 43 per cent and Labour on 30 per cent, at the end of a week in which Jeremy Corbyn has set out his manifesto policies.

Mr Johnson’s lead has shrunk by two per cent, but he will be heartened by the continuing collapse in Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party – now down to just three points and posing a much lower risk of splitting the Tory vote in their target marginals.

Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats have rallied from 11 per cent to 16 per cent, but Tory strategists will not be too concerned as long as the party continues to vie with Labour for pro-Remain voters in marginal seats.

What might alarm them is the narrowing in the leadership ratings: Mr Johnson is now only 24 points ahead of the Labour leader, down from 45 points at the start of the campaign, with a rating of minus ten.

But voters are clear who they would rather spend Christmas with – 47 per cent say Mr Johnson, with just 27 per cent plumping for Mr Corbyn.

If the figures for party support were translated into a uniform national swing, Mr Johnson would be on course for a majority of 82 – but likely voting patterns remain unpredictable. Joe Twyman, co-founder and director of Deltapoll, said last night: ‘The results show the Conservatives maintaining a double-digit lead over Labour. Since the start of the campaign, support for the top two parties has moved relatively little, but only this week did voters get a look at detailed policies as the manifestos were released.

‘During the 2017 campaign, the release of t he Labour Party manifesto handed Jeremy Corbyn some positive momentum, followed by a difficult manifesto launch from the Conservatives and a U- turn on their social care policy.

‘The importance of the manifestos can be overstated, however. Most members of the electorate are paying less attention to the specific details and are more influenced by the broad narratives surrounding the parties’.

Deltapoll interviewed 1,519 British adults online between November 21 and 23. The data has been weighted to be representative of the British adult population as a whole.