David Cameron slips in personality polls

David Cameron's personal ratings have slid in the crucial marginal seats after a series of setbacks that climaxed this week with the Ashcroft tax furore.

At the same time as Labour has been catching up in the polls, the Tory leader is no longer as clearly ahead on issues of character.

There is also doubt about his key policies on the economy, named by most voters as the key election issue.

Only 22 per cent believed Mr Cameron would bring "change for the better", while 35 per cent said he would make things worse and another 35 per cent said he would make no difference.

Mr Brown's key economic argument that Conservative plans for cuts would risk the recovery seems to have hit home with many voters.

Only 36 per cent agreed that cuts should start now, while 46 per cent say either not now or never.

A separate survey found a sharp rise in voter support for Mr Brown over recent weeks.

The number who said they could not be sure what Mr Cameron stood for went up from 23 to 26 per cent. For Mr Brown, the number went down from 25 to 23 over the same period.

Asked who would take tough and unpopular decisions, the Tories were ahead on 27. But the Labour rating climbed from 21 per cent to 24.

Senior Tories say they are not alarmed yet because there is time to recover. However one said: "If this change is confirmed in more polls over several weeks then there will be real worry."

Mr Cameron is seen by his own side to have had a bad winter, with fumbles over policy on the married couples tax and whether cuts would be "swingeing", mistakes over campaign figures like the bungled claim that half of teenagers got pregnant, and the row over the "air-brushed" poster.

Most damagingly, last weekend's fightback conference in Brighton was wiped out by the Ashcroft affair, which rumbled on today with claims that the peer avoided paying VAT for polling research costing an estimated £250,000 he had carried out as part of his campaign for Tory modernisation.

YouGov polled 3,500 people in marginal seats for Channel 4 News, the crucial battleground for the election, and found the Conservatives were doing two per cent better than elsewhere, pointing to Mr Cameron leading the biggest party in a hung parliament.

The Prime Minister was slightly preferred to run things in "current economic difficulties", by 31 to 28 per cent.

But when asked which team would make their families better off, 30 per cent said Mr Cameron and George Osborne, and 28 per cent chose Mr Brown and Alistair Darling. A bigger number, 32 per cent, said neither team would make them better off.

A separate survey for the Sun found a sharp rise in voter support for Mr Brown over recent weeks.

The number who said they could not be sure what Mr Cameron stood for went up from 23 to 26 per cent. For Mr Brown, the number went down from 25 to 23 per cent over the same period.