ICM show Conservatives back at 40%

There is a new ICM poll in tomorrow's News of the World. ICM's previous poll was in mid February, just as the polls started to really narrow, and showed the Conservatives down to 37% and their lead down to 7 points, the lowest they had recorded since December 2008. Since then YouGov's daily poll, ComRes and MORI have all shown the lead narrowing.

Tomorrow's poll, however, has topline figures of CON 40%(+3), LAB 31%(+1), LDEM 18%(-2), putting the Conservative lead back up to 9 points and their share back to 40%. The changes themself are the margin of error and don't necessarily mean anything, but I'm sure it will give some cheer to the Conservatives. As ever, it is worth being wary of any apparent change in the trend in the polls until we see it picked up in other polling (we did see an increase for the Conservatives in TNS BMRB's poll yesterday too, but as new entrants we don't really have the measure of them yet).

Note also the drop in Lib Dem support from the company that normally gives them their highest levels of support. It isn't unusual for the Liberal Democrats to suffer in this "pre-campaign" period. The media tend to get caught up in the horse race between Labour and the Conservatives, pushing out the Lib Dems from media coverage. They will likely recover when we reach the campaign proper and are guaranteed an increased level of media coverage.

For methodology geeks, ICM's topline adjustment for "the spiral of silence" - the re-allocation of don't knows according to which party they voted for at the last election - increased the Conservative lead in this poll. Before the re-allocation the topline figures would have been CON 40%, LAB 32%, LDEM 18%. For many years now this adjustment has tended to help Labour, with "shy Tories" long since replaced by "Bashful Blairites". I very much doubt this means anything - it's probably just a freak occurance - so please don't get all excited about the return of shy Tories (at least, not yet!) but nevertheless it's interesting to see it again. Ironically, without the topline adjustment the Conservative lead in the previous ICM poll would have been 9 points, so would have fallen in this poll.

In other questions, 57% of people said they expected to watch at least one of the live televised debates - while it would be nice it there were that level of interest in the election, I'll believe it when I see it. Asked who they expected to see win, we once again see the expectation problem that David Cameron is going to face - 48% of people expect him to do best in the debates, compared to 23% for Brown and 12% for Clegg.

Asked which party has the best policies on various issues things are once again looking competitive - at some points in the last few years the Conservatives led on nearly everything. Labour are very narrowly ahead on tax, and ahead on terrorism and Afghanistan. The Conservatives are narrowly ahead on handling the recession and the NHS, ahead on schools and crime and decisively ahead on immigration. We are in quite an unusual political position when we find the Conservatives ahead on the normally Labour issue of the NHS, but Labour ahead on the normally Conservative issue of taxation.