
YouGov/Times – CON 45, LAB 29, LD 10, UKIP 7
The latest YouGov/Times poll has topline figures of CON 45%(-3), LAB 29%(+4), LDEM 10%(-2), UKIP 7%(+2). Fieldwork was Tuesday to Wednesday. While sixteen points is still a very solid Conservative lead it’s down from the towering twenty-points-plus leads that most polls have shown since the election was called. As ever, it’s wrong to read too much into a single poll and this may turn out to be just random sample variation, but it may be that that the immediate boost the Conservatives got from the election announcement has started to deflate. We shall see.
While I’m here, tomorrow’s Mirror is quoting some “Labour insider” saying that Labour’s private polling is showing them at 20%. I’ve written about private polling before – people tend to get very excited about it when they shouldn’t. Just because a poll is “private” doesn’t make it any more accurate or reliable. In fact, given we can’t see it and check whether it is actually true, or something that’s got wildly exaggerated through rumour and half-truths, the information is far less reliable. My advice is always to ignore rumours of “private polls” unless the person responsible actually coughs up some tables for us to look at.