Latest Populus poll and a word about the Christmas break

We're clearly heading towards the Christmas polling break - we've still got the usual Populus poll this morning and YouGov poll tonight, but the weekly Lord Ashcroft poll has shut up shop for the year.

All the regular polls tend to stop over Christmas - ostensibly because it's difficult to get a reliable sample over holiday periods when people have better things to do than answer polls, but I expect there's a touch of us pollsters needing to have a holiday sometimes too. Last year Populus's last poll was on the 22nd, so we should have a couple more from them and YouGov normally stop just before Christmas so there are few more from that front too. We also still have the monthly ICM and Ipsos MORI polls to come. ~~ComRes's monthly telephone poll has been right at the end of each month lately, so we might see that brought forward, or saved until after Christmas.~~ Scratch that last bit - it's being brought forward to before Christmas, out later tonight.

Anyway, our one poll so far this Monday is Populus's, with topline figures of CON 34%, LAB 36%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 12%, GRN 5%. Tabs are here.

UPDATE: The daily YouGov/Sun poll today has toplines of CON 32%, LAB 34%, LDEM 6%, UKIP 14%, GRN 8%. YouGov have had the Greens sneaking ahead of the Lib Dems quite a few times lately, but until today it's only been by a single point.

Meanwhile the monthly ComRes/Indy telephone poll has topline figures of CON 29%(+1), LAB 32%(+1), LDEM 12%(+3), UKIP 16%(-2), GRN 5%(-2). A much better score for the Lib Dems there, the highest that ComRes have shown for over a year.

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