Queen enjoys record support in Guardian/ICM poll

Pre-diamond jubilee surge in royalism hides bad news for Prince Charles, with almost half wanting succession to jump to William

Queen Elizabeth II attends Royal Academy of Arts jubilee celebration in London 23/5/12

The Queen at a diamond jubilee celebration at the Royal Academy of Arts on Wednesday.

As the Queen prepares to celebrate her diamond jubilee, the royal family is enjoying record popularity, but things could get a good deal more complicated after she leaves the scene, according to a new Guardian/ICM poll.

Britain would be worse off without the monarchy say 69% of respondents, while of 22% say the country would be better off. This 47-point royalist margin is the largest chalked up on any of the 12 occasions since 1997 on which ICM has previously asked the question.

Pro-royal feeling is spread remarkably equally among the social classes, and across the regions of England and Wales. It is less marked in Scotland – where 36% say the country would be better off without the Windsors – but even there a solid 50% feel the opposite way. Support is stronger among the older, and especially among Conservative voters, in whose ranks it reaches 82%. But across every age group and among Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters alike, the monarchy is enjoying solid support.

But if "long to reign over us" is the diamond jubilee sentiment, that could be partly out of nervousness about what is coming next. When voters were asked what should happen when the Queen dies or if she abdicates, they remain resolutely anti-republican, with just 10% saying Britain should elect a head of state instead of having a new monarch. But if there is support for the hereditary principle, there is much less for what it means in practice. Only 39% want the crown to pass to Prince Charles in line with the succession; 48% who want it to skip a generation and pass straight to Prince William.

There is no sign whatsoever of the son setting himself up as a young pretender against the father but, should he be tempted, the poll suggests he could count on solid support among younger voters, Labour supporters and the C2DE social grades which sit at the bottom of the National Statistics pyramid. An outright majority of 50% of each of these groups indicate a preference for a premature coronation of William V.

The Queen continues to retain her popularity. According to Ipsos Mori data from the 1980s and 90s, the person who most often rivalled her ratings was Diana, a finding that may excite the wilder conspiracy theorists. But in this, as in all matters concerning the length of a reign which stretches back to the very infancy of British polling, we are dependent on occasional attitudinal snapshots rather than the sort of month-in-month-out series available on voting intention.

American admiration

The earliest data which the Guardian could track down was not about British attitudes but American ones, just three months after the coronation in February 1953. The vast majority of respondents volunteered descriptions such as "charming" and "wonderful". A mere 6% made negative remarks about monarchs in general, and just 1% ventured anything negative about the woman herself. A few years later in a 1957 Gallup poll, 83% of Americans rated her to some degree favourably, against just 7% who leant the other way. Her stateside standing has rarely diminished, and she is by some margin the woman who has most often ranked on Gallup's annual top 10 of people Americans admire.

Closer to home, there is little data from before the 1960s. One nugget we do have from before the Elizabethan age is from Gallup in 1946. Asked whom they most admired, 24% of voters volunteered Winston Churchill, while reigning monarch George VI and his Queen languished behind on 3%. That put them on the same level as Joseph Stalin and below Clement Attlee, Field Marshal Montgomery, George Bernard Shaw.

The questions are irregular and often inconsistently framed, but when set against this sepia snapshot about the old king, the data we have strongly suggests the Queen has consistently been more popular than her father.

The oldest substantial information the Guardian could find about British attitudes was from the British Election Study, which got going a decade into the Queen's reign, just before the 1964 election which brought Labour's Harold Wilson to power.

It asked about whether people felt the monarchy was very, quite or not at all important. Support for the Queen was remarkably resilient throughout the 1960s, with about 60% rating the monarchy as very important and about 15% who said it was of no importance. Only in 1969 did the anti-royal number briefly rise, to a still underwhelming 27%.

A slightly more personal test of the Queen's popularity, perhaps, is the public's take on whether or not she deserved a pay rise. In 1969, Gallup found 46% felt she deserved a pay rise. By 1971, the same company found 57% were ready to double her allowance to an annual £1m, which was a good deal more then than today.

Around the same time, we get the first tests of the idea of abolishing the crown entirely and making the UK a republic. In 1969, Gallup found that 18% preferred that option. The silver jubilee, the Sex Pistols, Diana and the golden jubilee all came and went without permanently altering that figure. In the week of the Queen's 50th anniversary on the throne, in June 2002, an Ipsos Mori poll found 19% would prefer a republic. It asked the same question more than 20 times in the 1990s and 2000s and each time found the republican minority within three points of that 19% figure. Only in its most recent survey, conducted amid a mood of respect for the octogenarian woman and a sexagenarian monarch, does it dip to 13%.

Swing to indifference

We can track rather more of the reign if we switch to a better off/worse off without the royals question, of the sort used in our surveyon Thursday. Ipsos Mori asked that question throughout the 1980s and 1990s and, as fairytale weddings gave way to the divorces of Charles and Andrew, there was a steady swing away from the steadfast royalist "worse off" vote to a position of indifference. The "indifferents" fleetingly overtook the "worse offs" in the Queen's "annus horribilis" of 1992 (when flames at Windsor Castle followed rows about her tax-exempt status) and then again just before Diana's death. But in neither case did the hardline "better off without them" vote get enough traction to get beyond a fifth. In both cases, the royalists soon bounced back to a modest lead, even if they never quite got back to the scores of about 70% they had enjoyed in the mid-1980s.

From the late 1990s onwards, the ICM's own tracker, which forces a straight choice, has oscillated wildly, but never quite wildly enough to put the anti-royalists in the lead or even to get the margin down to single figures.

ICM Jubilee question Photograph: Graphic

There was a bit of a monarchist moment in 1998 as the royals regained public affection after the traumas of Diana's death, with the "worse off without them" lead surging to 44% before then falling back to about 20%.

There was a brief boost from the golden jubilee in 2002, a brief dip (as on several polling indicators) in early 2005, before Charles's marriage to Camilla, a prospect which stirred some old demons but which the polling suggests also laid them to rest, because the royal position immediately strengthened after the event. The monarchy surged further after William's wedding last year, and now the gap has widened again.

The Queen's personal rating, measured as the difference between the proportion satisfied and the proportion dissatisfied with the way she is doing her job, has not been measured since 2006, but the established trend at that point was running strongly in her favour – the score was +78 percentage points.

To put that into context, our Guardian/ICM poll this week gave scores to David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg of -11, -12 and -27 respectively.

ICM Research interviewed a random sample of 1,002 adults aged 18 plus from 18 to 20 May 2012. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

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