Malcolm Turnbull admits he does really care about polls, especially when they look like this.

Turns out politicians do care about polls.  They just pretended they didn’t.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has admitted what we all knew anyway – that politicians do care about the polls.

Speaking on last night’s 7.30, Mr Turnbull told Leigh Sales: “It’s like one of those things that every politician says, many politicians say: ‘We don’t look at the opinion polls. Nobody looks at opinion polls’.”

But he then blew it for all the other pollies with the blunt admission that they all actually did.

“Nobody looks at the polls with more attention than politicians,” he said.

To think they had us all fooled.

And just hours after he made the admission he would have been a very happy man, with the latest Newspoll showing Mr Turnbull has surged ahead of Labor for the first time since its first horrific and scarring budget.

The poll put the PM as the most popular prime minister in more than five years, with 55 per cent rating him as the preferred Prime Minister. The Australian writes that this is the highest rating since Julia Gillard in July 2010 and 18 points greater than Mr Abbott’s last poll two weeks ago.

The Government has consistently trailed the opposition in more than 180 opinion polls.

But today’s Newspoll shows Bill Shorten’s support is now at the lowest level for any leader in six years giving the Coalition an election-winning lead over Labor, 51 per cent to 49 per cent, after preferences.

The Coalition’s primary vote jumped five points to 44 per cent. The Newspoll shows that this is its highest level since November 2013 and only 1.6 points below the result at the last election.

The Greens’ primary vote has dropped slightly to 11 per cent, while those in the “others” category remains unchanged at 10 per cent.

The margin of error for the poll, which surveyed 1,645 voters, is three per cent.

The poll was taken after Mr Turnbull ousted Mr Abbott last Monday night, but before he announced his new Cabinet.

Mr Turnbull admitted last night that he had been “extraordinarily lucky” in life – not just in the polls.

“The important thing is to have the emotional intelligence and the empathy and the imagination that enables you to walk in somebody else’s shoes,” he said, when Sales asked the $200m man how he would relate to “ordinary Australians”.

“To be able to sit down with them on a train or in the street, hear their story, and have the imagination to understand how they feel. Emotional intelligence is probably the most important asset for – certainly for anyone in my line of work.”

Also speaking on the ABC last night Opposition leader Bill Shorten told Q &A that he actually wasn’t too worried about Mr Turnbull.

He doesn’t care about opinion polls, you see…

“Let me state at the outset that I will not be worried about Malcolm Turnbull replacing Tony Abbott,” he said.

“I think it is a good thing for this country that Tony Abbott is no longer PM of Australia.”

Only a few weeks ago Tony Abbott told 7.30 that political polls were just something “people in the press gallery like to hyperventilate” about – politicians didn’t care.

It looks like once again Mr Abbott has been proven to have been misled by his colleagues, who themselves may be hyperventilating with relief this morning.