On Saturday, the Times ran a YouGov poll of 1,960 adults from April 13-14, which found that 56% felt Boris Johnson should resign over his Partygate lies, with the total rising to 63% if further fines are issued.
The Daily Mail, by contrast, ran a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll of 1,500 voters the day before that maintained 66% were “tired” of hearing about the parties held in No 10 Downing Street during the pandemic, with 54% saying the country should “move on”. Redfield & Wilton Strategies, set up in 2020 by a 39-year-old lawyer named Bruno Rodrigues, has not so far posted this particular survey in full – as is the custom – on its website.
Leaving its daily stablemate looking even more isolated, the slavishly pro-Johnson Mail on Sunday then ran a Deltapoll survey of 1,550 British adults that acknowledged – albeit less than prominently – that 57% of those polled believed Johnson should resign after being found to have broken the lockdown laws.
Redfield & Wilton appears to have usurped JL Partners as the Daily Mail’s pollster of choice. It was set up by James Johnson, a Tory supporter who formerly worked as an adviser to Theresa May. As a student, he went on a road trip around America with, somewhat bizarrely, a life-size cardboard cut-out of the then Tory minister Eric Pickles, with whom he photographed himself at a variety of locations.
