MORI show Ken ahead

A London voting intention poll by Ipsos MORI for Unison has voting intentions has topline voting intentions of JOHNSON 38%, LIVINGSTONE 41%, PADDICK 12%. Once second preferences are reallocated Ken Livingstone leads by 6% over Johnson. It was conducted between the 23rd and 24th April.

Ipsos MORI also asked a question about whether people were actually registered to vote, though bizarrely the implication in this Guardian article is that they were still included in the topline figures, since once they were excluded Livingstone's lead fell to 4% on second preferences.

No other details yet. There should be more mayoral polls from YouGov, mruk, ICM and - possibly - another Ipsos MORI to come before polling day on Thursday. Unless other pollsters also show a Livingstone lead the race is looking close enough to produce a real embarrassment for at least one pollster.

UPDATE: it appears the poll was leaked to the Guardian, and shouldn't have been published yet. It's the Guardian who emphasised the 6 point lead that included people who aren't eligible to vote, MORI I assume will be correctly excluding them from their topline figures! Over at Mike Smithson's site he also says that, in response to his comment that this is the poll MORI will be judged upon for the mayoral election, MORI are pointing out "that the fieldwork was carried out more than a week before the election and a third of respondents said they might change their mind." MORI are quite correct in this - in all fairness a poll does need to be done within a couple of the days of the election to really be compared to the result...but it does sound like they are hedging their bets already. Whether it is entirely fair or not, if polling companies' final figures are showing different winners for the London election, it is going to reflect very badly on the companies who get it wrong.