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Poll analysis: Thursday April 7
MORI chairman Sir Robert Worcester analyses the latest opinion poll data.
Tony Blair has as good as promised to reappoint Gordon Brown to the Treasury. BBC News 24 reported with the polls showing Brown running stronger with the electorate than Tony, he didn’t have much choice.
In 1978 I’d had an hour’s meeting with Prime Minister Callaghan in Number 10. His political advisor Tom McNally had asked me to come in. As soon as I’d arrived, Mr Callaghan joined us. For an hour he grilled me on the findings of my latest polls about everything from his persona to Scottish devolution.
Later that evening, I watched World in Action and Ludo Kennedy’s live interview with Mr Callaghan. A few days before, my poll for Derek Jameson in the Daily Express had the Labour Party a few points behind the Tories. "I see that Labour is three points down in the polls prime minister; what do you have to say about that?" Ludo asked. Mr Callaghan replied: "Oh, I read them out of interest, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to them."
Later in the interview Kennedy asked "Prime minister, what about the problem of separatism in Scotland?" The PM’s quick reply? "Everybody knows that only 20 per cent of Scots are separatists."
Wonder how he knew?
It’s not like that now. All (successful) senior politicians read the polls closely, and ask the most probing questions when they get a pollster in their clutches. I’m pretty sure that the prime minister is well aware that months ago we found when running a 'trial heat' we found that Gordon Brown as prime minister caused the Labour Party to run three points stronger than the standard question.
In January, for the Observer, we found that while Blair was trusted by 32 per cent of the electorate, and Howard by 28 per cent, Gordon Brown was trusted by 50 per cent. The same poll found that when asked who would be the most capable prime minister between them, Brown scored 39 per cent, Blair 35 per cent. Wonder is that when this has been the case for months, Tory Central Office was running the campaign 'Vote Blair, Get Brown'. Wonder whose brainchild that was?
YouGov, the internet polling company, is doing a recall poll on 1,735 people on April 5 who'd been interviewed earlier during their 21-31 baseline, and weighted their sample both demographically and to the base-line political findings, and came up with another close result: 36 per cent Conservative, 36 per cent Labour, 21 per cent Liberal Democrats and seven per cent other, and found 65 per cent said they definitely would vote from the 78 per cent who gave them a voting intention (51 per cent of their total sample) and apparently did not reallocate their don’t knows.
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