Why’s that?England comparative success in Euro 1996 did not help the Tory government.As for comparing polls from 92 to 97 Anthony has made this point several times, and again in this thread.Those 30% Labour leads would have been whittled down substantially using today’s, more accurate, methodolgy.That said, ICM were still producing Labour leads of around 15%+ ,comparing to the curent Tory lead of around 5%. My hunch is, based on nothing more than 28 years of political activisim, poll watching and gut feeling,that we have returned to the ‘usual’ situation of unpopular mid term governmemts, and the subsqequent poll ratings.

All these polls show is it’s all to play for.The media pick up a story and bludgeon it to death until the next news story comes along.At some stage the Tories will be in the firing line and their poll ratings will suffer.

MORI did amend their sampling technique to try and solve the problems of 1992, but they only made major changes that brought their final figures in line with ICM, Populus and so on in February 2003 when they added their likelihood to vote filter. Prior to that their polls continued to report larger Labour leads. The only companies polling in 1992 gradually disappeared from the scene one way or another to be replaced by new companies that used methodologies more like ICM’s.

Andy is quite correct – if you want to look at trends in 1992-1997 look at ICM and ignore everyone else. ICM’s polls turned out to be far more accurate come 1997, and their methodology isstill broadly comparable to what they produce today.

Andy D – yes, events, particularly economic, may well still seal the government’s fate, but I’m struggling to believe that there are still “shy” Tories out there, or that as others have pointed out, the nearer Labour gets to it’s core vote the less need there is to adjust downwards Labour’s poll ratings based on the “likelihood to vote”.

Whilst issue and leadership indicators look bad, even a pessimist like myself looks at 5-7% deficits mid-term after awful news stories and thinks, we might just claw that back.

I don’t want to make a point against a nice bloke like Ming Campbell, but Vince Cable’s good performance does indicate that an older politician – in historical terms one could say a more normally aged politician – can do well. That is an important point, because I am concerned that in falling over themselves to pick leaders who will do well in the polls, both opinion polls and actual elections, the parties are looking to candidates who may not have sufficent experience for a very senior executive role. I am sorry to say it, but Campbell’s poor, and specifically hesitant, image and performance may not have been so much due to age as to the aftereffects of his health issues. Why is it acceptable for a party to be concerned about negative impact of their leader’s age on the polls, when I doubt the relevance of age anyway, but not of their health?

Perhaps the real issue is that the electorate are becoming more sophisticated about the effectiveness of leaders and, as Brown is finding out, are becoming ruthless at taking against any indication of incompetence. If this is so, is physical presentability, including age, as important for popularity as is assumed in political circles?

Just a thought, but one reason for decreasing importance of presentability may be that physical appearance is particularly important for television. But now people are turning away from “the box” in favour of computers and the internet. And whilst of course we do look at images on the internet, there is a greater place for textual information, including indeed UKPollingReport. What politicans need, for instance, is favourable mention in the news snippets we read as we log onto email, and such snippets are driven by real achievement or otherwise, not what the politican looks like. If Vince Cable gets a good paragraph on the internet about Government incompetence over Qinetiq, it is no longer offset by his baldness.

It’s also worth remembering that in the last 18 months of the Callaghan government (1977-1979) the Conservatives often struggled to be the lead at all let alone be ahead in double figures, yet they managed a comfortable majority at the end of that period – after the unforseen “Winter of Discontent”.
Who is to say what is round the corner?

The best thing to do with that era is to take the ICM polls as reference. With the other pollsters of the time (gallup in particular), you’d be looking at Labour winning the 97 election by 20 points or more and pushing 50% overall (looking at the eve of poll predictions)

With ICM, the Labour Party got to a pretty consistent 15-17 point lead in the mid-term and ended up winning the election by 12.5%.

Labour are still only four or five points below their winning percentage from the last election, and a few points above their low water-mark in the final days of Blair. They may fall to the high 20s, but the Tories really should be doing a lot better than 40% and single digit leads mid-term if they are to be cushioned against any subsequent Labour recovery.

Other newspapers chop and change depending on who is available, so for the Sun (for example) you might get polls by YouGov or by MORI, the News of the World used to use Populus a lot, now they often seem to use ICM. MORI’s monthly poll doesn’t have a regular contract, so sometimes it is published in the FT, sometimes the Observer. It all changes.