MORI show Tory lead down to 5 points

As I had rather hoped we are getting a real flurry of polls now - a new MORI poll in this morning's Daily Mirror shows the Conservative lead dropping to 5 points, bringing it much more into line with polls from other companies than the 11 point lead they showed last time.

The full topline figures, with changes from their last poll, are CON 41%(-2), LAB 36%(+4), LDEM 11%(-4). The poll was conducted on the 10th and 11th of December. The Liberal Democrat score is the lowest they have recorded since October last year straight after Ming Campbell resigned, although MORI do tend to produce some of the lower scores for the Liberal Democrats.

We should get an ICM poll for the Guardian tonight. Their previous poll showed a fifteen point Tory lead at the height of negative press coverage about the PBR and I would be very surprised if they didn't show a comparable drop in the Tory lead. If they do we may yet end the year with a broadly consistent picture across the polls - with companies all showing a Conservative lead down to single figures. That said, ICM aren't likely to show the Lib Dems as far down as 11% and there are still another MORI poll, YouGov's monthly poll, and probably another ComRes poll to come before we can draw a curtain over 2008.

UPDATE: Just for the record, I was looking at that 11% for the Lib Dems and wondering about prompting by party name. When Ipsos MORI used to do their interviews face-to-face they showed respondents a card with the party names on for them to choose from. Since they've switched to phone polling, it's isn't obvious how they prompt with party name. Could the low Lib Dem score be because they weren't prompting with party name anymore? I'm happy to report it isn't: MORI's question is now "How would you vote if there were a General Election held tomorrow? Would you vote (rotate order) Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat or for some other party?", with the SNP and Plaid included in Scotland and Wales respectively.