It has been a rough few months for British Prime Minister David Cameron. As if keeping the first coalition government in forty years united wasn’t hard enough, Cameron recently lost his Communications Director Andy Coulson amid scandalous allegations that he was involved in cell phone hacking while working at News of the World. Although the student protests of the Fall have subsided and Conservative Party Headquarters is no longer under siege from thousands of tuition fee crusaders, the effects of the deep austerity measures implemented by the government have begun to drag Cameron’s Conservatives down in the opinion polls. A Com Res poll issued on February 9th shows the Conservatives now trail the Labour Party by seven percentage points.
Less than a year ago the Conservatives won a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, besting Labour by over five percentage points. So what happened? Cameron’s “full, comprehensive” offer to the Liberal Democrats to join in an official governing coalition was met with concern from party faithful and the spending cuts promised in the Conservative Manifesto have proven tough for the nation to swallow. Several British commentators are already speculating that this is just the beginning of an even bigger slide in the polls for Cameron and one that will result in the Labour Party reclaiming their majority in the Commons.
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