First post-Conway poll
A new poll by ICM in the Sunday Telegraph has topline voting intention figures (with changes from their previous poll) of CON 37%(nc), LAB 32%(-3), LDEM 21%(+1). The poll was conducted between the 30th and 31st January.
Since ICM last did a poll we've seen two significant events - Peter Hain's resignation and the Derek Conway scandal. Looking at the raw figures would suggest that Hain damaged Labour, but Conway didn't damage the Tories. I suspect that isn't actually the picture, the last ICM poll was already showing an unusual Labour increase that I suspect may have been overblown and this poll merely underlines a Conservative decrease we'd already seen.
That aside, the first post-Conway poll is still suggesting the Tories haven't suffered huge damage, doubly surprising since coverage of it would have been all over the press when people were replying to this poll. Why not? Perhaps it's sample error, the Tories are really down but this poll is falsely showing them static. Perhaps it really hasn't damaged them, or the benefit has balanced out the damage. We expect a story like this to damage a party, but it doesn't always do so -
Mike Smithson has a theory that the Conservatives always improve when Cameron is on the telly, even if it's a negative news story. It could even be that the (relatively) swift dismissal of Conway helped Cameron.
My own expectation is that the story will damage the Conservatives, it certainly still has legs(though there is no reason to think it won't spread to other parties, MPs across the spectrum employ family members) Populus are next up, tend to give some of the more favourable figures for Labour and I wouldn't be surprised to see findings similar to MORI's last poll from them next week, but we shall see.
Beyond voting intention, the poll asked about policies that would make people more likely to vote Conservative. Amongst non-Tory supporters the most popular potential policy was putting more police on the street - a net +63 (i.e. 63% more people said it made them more likely than said it could make them less likely) said it would make them more likely to vote Tory, +38 would more likely to vote Tory if they forced people to reduce greenhouse gases, +30 if they reduced immigration, +29 for allowing terrorist suspects to be held for longer, +22 for allowing more grammar schools.
Allowing a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty was lower, with a net plus of only 13. Cutting taxes and spending was a negative of -6: it would repell more people than it would attract, though as Tim Montgomerie rightly notes, there are some tax cuts like council tax or inheritance tax that polls suggest are more popular (Tim is also right to say that it these questions would be far more interesting if they were restricted to only those who might change - realistically many of the people answering these questions would actually never vote Tory whatever policies they promised.)
