YouGov’s weekly poll for the Sunday Times has topline voting intention figures of CON 44%(-1), LAB 35%(+3), LDEM 9%(+1), UKIP 3%(-3). Changes are from the YouGov/Times polls in the week. The fieldwork was, as usual, conducted on Thursday afternoon and Friday, so was wholly after the Conservative manifesto launch (though, of course, before much of the media reporting and discussion of it)

The nine point Tory lead is the lowest we’ve seen so far this campaign, the first in single figures. As ever, one should be cautious of unusual polls and wait to see if the trend is backed up by other polls before getting either too excited or too panicked (depending upon one’s point of view!). Perhaps it could be that the Conservative manifesto and the coverage of the changes to care funding has knocked their support. Perhaps it’s just a continuation of the gradual narrowing of the Tory lead that we have been seeing anyway over recent weeks. Perhaps it’s just a bit of a outlier, and the next round of polls will go back to showing a larger Tory lead. Time will tell.

There is also supposedly a Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday. No idea yet if that was after the manifesto launches and whether or not it will show a similar tightening.

UPDATE: No figures from the Survation poll yet, but according to the front page of the Mail on Sunday it was done after the manifesto launch and shows a Tory lead of 12 points.

UPDATE 2: The Survation figures are CON 46%, LAB 34%, LD 8%, UKIP 3%. Tabs are here. Changes are complicated – Survation’s previous poll had an 18 point lead, but that was conducted by telephone for Good Morning Britain, while this one is online. Survation’s last online poll using a comparable method was, I think, back in April, and had only an 11 point lead for the Tories.

Ipsos MORI’s monthly political monitor came out today, with topline figures of CON 49%(nc), LAB 34%(+8), LDEM 7%(-6), UKIP 2%(-2). Changes are since their April poll, conducted just after Theresa May has called the general election. Fieldwork was Monday to Wednesday and tabs are here.

In this morning’s Times we also had voting intention figures from YouGov, which showed topline voting intention figures of CON 45%(-4), LAB 32%(+1), LDEM 8%(-1), UKIP 6%(+3). Changes are from the YouGov/Sunday Times poll at the weekend. Fieldwork was on Tuesday and Wednesday and tabs are here.

We’re continuing too see a narrowing of the gap between Labour and the Conservatives – though given the head start the Tories began the campaign with that still leaves them a very long way ahead. Far from gaining during the campaign, the Liberal Democrats appear to be fading away. UKIP are being squeezed away completely (not long ago the six point figures from YouGov would have been absolutely awful for them, now it’s one of their better figures from recent polls).

Part of Labour’s recent gain may well because the fieldwork in most recent polls was conducted in the context of Labour releasing lots of broadly popular policies and hence getting lots of comparatively positive coverage. The next round of polls though will have been largely conducted when the media was busy giving lots of coverage to the Conservative party’s policies and promises. These were not as obviously crowd-pleasing as Labour’s offering, but I guess we’ll get a better idea of how they’ve been received and if there is any significant impact in the weekend polls.

Looking at the rest of the MORI and YouGov polls, YouGov asked some questions on whether people thought taxes would rise if Labour or the Conservatives won. I expect very few will be surprised to find that far more people expect taxes for the rich to rise if Labour win than if the Conservatives win. More interesting is that expectations of tax levels for “people like you” are very similar for Labour and Conservative – if Labour win, 47% expect their taxes to go up, if the Conservatives win, 46% expect their taxes to go up. Labour aren’t seen as necessarily meaning ordinary people would pay more tax, people expect their taxes to rise whoever wins.

MORI asked a question about whether Labour were ready to form a government (30% think they are, 60% think they aren’t) and whether Jeremy Corbyn is ready to be PM (31% think he is, 60% think he isn’t). Both questions were also asked about Labour under Ed Miliband in 2015 – figures on the party being ready for government are similar (33% thought Labour were ready in 2015, 30% do now), on the leadership question Jeremy Corbyn actually scores substantially better (31% think he is ready to be PM, only 21% thought the same about Miliband).