According to YouGov polling with fieldwork done on the 15-16 of July, the Tories are on 44%, which is up 2 points from their polling done on the 7-8 July. This intervening period covered the aftermath of the England football team booing of the knee row. This, we were told by members of the commentariat and the collective wisdom of Twitter, was a disaster for the Tories. The Tories were losing the culture war we were told by the collective scribbling luminaries of the left:

• Simon Kelner: Priti Patel and other Tories are roundly losing the culture war
• Rachel Cunliffe: “backlash against the government’s stance on England players taking the knee shows there is a cost to its “anti-woke” strategy.“
• Alain Tolhurst: “How The Culture War Backfired On The Tories“
• Arj Singh: “Tories’ Culture War Going Down Like A ‘Lead Balloon’“
• Andrew Adonis “Johnson’s government started a “war on woke”—but it isn’t going to plan“
• Paul Mason “The dialectic’s point of change? Did the left, the team and the progressive majority just pull off a major piece of cultural politics?“

All of the above have committed the error of looking at Twitter’s reaction during the row and presumed that represented national sentiment. Wrong, unrepresentative dataset. Despite all the headlines and premature claims of victory in the culture war, the evidence is that the Tories are stronger now than they were before that particular row. Did it even register in the real world?