The mystique of private polling
ConHome, Political Betting and now David Blackburn at CoffeeHouse have all picked up on a paragraph from Jackie Ashley's column this morning which says "Some Labour people may think I'm sounding too gloomy, but those who have been privy to recent private polling are a lot more than gloomy. This suggests that Labour could return to the Commons with just 120 MPs or thereabouts".
Rumours of private polling from the political parties are often given far more credence than they deserve, as if it's some special secret knowledge that trumps the stuff that is fully available for us to pore over.
Private polling isn't more accurate, pollsters are not like NHS consultants. They don't do cheap bog-standard polls for the papers, then bugger off down the road to plush, oak-panelled private polling offices to do much better polls for private clients. The voting intention polls that are carried out for the papers are the best that the pollsters can do and if some of the pollsters have private polls from the main UK pollsters, their voting intentions will in all likelihood be carried out in the same way with the same results (in fact, on principle I'd advise due scepticism of anyone showing anything wildly different).
For Labour to be reduced to only 120 seats on a uniform swing would require a Conservative lead of around about 28 points. With the main pollsters all showing leads in the mid-teens, I would treat any poll showing a Conservative lead of 28 points with extreme scepticism.
Of course, what political parties can do as part of their private polling is commission polls in specific seats, or specific groups of seats. It's just possible that is what is what is behind Jackie Ashley's claim. For Labour to actually be reduced to 120 seats, we'd have to see them lose seats like Vauxhall, Hackney North & Stoke Newington, Scunthorpe, Worsley & Eccles South, Alyn & Deeside, Stoke on Trent South - that sort of place, as opposed to Labour's absolute safe areas like former mining villages and Northern inner cities. Perhaps Labour have done some private polling in that sort of area and seen horrid results. More likely, some minister has just said something off the cuff to demonstrate how horrible their polling position is, and it doesn't reflect some great poll finding at all.
One of the issues at the time the British Polling Council was set up was political parties making outlandish claims about their private polling showing something different from the published polls. When Conservative morale flagged Lord Saatchi would wheel out some "private polling" allegedly showing how well the Conservatives were doing. Whether they actually showed that, or were slanting reporting or
interpretation the public and media couldn't tell, since the tables and questions were not made public.
These days under BPC rules if parties release stuff like this, they are obliged to release the tables that the research is based upon and observers can see for themselves what they really say, and whether the parties are trying to hoodwink them. In practice though, it doesn't work like that, the only difference it makes is that when they used to mention figures, now parties just say that their private polling "shows" something, without mentioning any actual figures or questions that interested parties could demand the release of under BPC disclosure rules. Hence we are even less able to tell if they mean anything at all.
My advice would be to ignore what political parties claim, or tell friendly journalists, their private polling says unless there are actual figures (and consequently tables) to check.
