Is Boris ahead in London?

The front page of the Evening Standard today has as a big headline of "Boris to be Mayor Again". It is a rather brave conclusion based on this ComRes poll.

Even being generous, it isn't really a voting intention poll - it's asking who people's favoured candidate would be out of Boris, Ken and Oona King, with Boris in a healthy first place.

Naturally this did not include a Liberal Democrat candidate, not candidates from other parties, but that's acceptable given that the London Mayoral election is conducted under a preferential system and the final run off will almost certainly be between Boris and the Labour candidate. Including Ken and Oona King is rather odd though, given it splits Labour support between two candidates - it might have been better to do two run off questions. Still, in this case it thankfully does not give a misleading result, since even if you add Ken and Oona King's preferences together Boris would still be more popular than them.

There are further question marks here though. Over on Liberal Conspiracy Don Paskini raises some sensible points about question order. Voting intention questions are nearly always asked first in an opinion poll, and certainly any questions that risk skewing answers are avoided. In this poll people appear to have been asked whether they agreed with Boris that it should be made harder to strike on the underground, and that London should be protected from cuts... then asked who was their favourite candidate (I should add that Don's allegation that the poll was deliberately skewed to help Boris is almost certainly nonsense. No professional pollster would do such a thing - we have some integrity you know.)

Meanwhile Mike Smithson on Political Betting points out that the poll does not appear to have been politically weighted. ComRes always weight their voting intention polls, but sometimes don't do it on other polls, where they claim it doesn't make much difference. Even if Mike's correct, it's unclear what difference this would have made - political weighting of phone polls helps the Conservatives, but this was conducted online. In ComRes's previous published online poll political weighting helped Labour.

So, what is the actual position? Well, the last actual mayoral voting intention question I can find is over a year old from YouGov in April 2009, which found in a re-run Boris would beat Ken by 49% to 33%. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, but despite all the question marks mentioned above it would be churlish to say this poll isn't pretty positive for Boris. However, I wouldn't be confident enough to treat it as a voting intention poll. Nor would I conclude that Boris is set to be mayor again when there is a year and a half of campaigning and massive government cuts to come before any actual votes are cast.

UPDATE: YouGov's daily GB voting intention figures for tonight are CON 42%, LAB 38%, LDEM 11%