The public's judgement on the email smears

I am expecting at least two new polls in the Sunday newspapers, our first chance to see how the public have reacted to the email smears and the political fuss around it over the last few days. I will update here as soon as the figures are available.

UPDATE: The Sunday Telegraph has a Marketing Sciences Ltd poll. My understanding is this is a sister company to ICM, with the poll presumably done by the sister brand because otherwise it would clash with ICM's contractual obligations to the Guardian. The poll was conducted on Wednesday and Thursday.

The topline figures are CON 43%, LAB 26%, LDEM 21%, putting the Conservatives 17 points ahead. With the exception of a single MORI poll in February that in hindsight screamed "rogue poll", this is the largest Tory lead since September.

On the assumption that this poll was conducted in exactly the same way as ICM's polls, the changes since their last poll are Conservatives down 1, Labour down 5, the Lib Dems up 3 and presumably the "others" up 3 or so. It appears from this poll at least that Labour have suffered damage from the smear emails, but that it has been to the benefit of the Lib Dems, others (and I expect, non voters) rather than the Conservatives.

I'm expecting at least one more poll tonight, so we'll see if it confirms this pattern.

Looking at the rest of the questions in the poll 36% of respondents said they blame Gordon brown for presiding over a dirty trick culture at number 10, 50% did not.

Asked who they would most like to see replace Gordon Brown were he to resign as Labour leader, Jack Straw lead on 23%, followed by David Miliband 14%, Alan Johnson 7%, Harriet Harman on 6%, Ed Miliband on 4%, Ed Balls on 3% and James Purnell on 1%. As usual, questions like this probably say a lot more about how well known Brown's potential successors are, rather than how popular they woulb be as PM.

UPDATE 2: There is a second poll from BPIX in the Mail on Sunday has topline figures of CON 45%, LAB 26% - Lib Dems to be confirmed. It has been 6 months since the last BPIX poll was published, so changes can't tell us much about reaction to the email smear scandal alone (Tim Montgomerie on ConHome is comparing it to YouGov's last poll - you shouldn't, my understanding is they use different weighting.)

There is normally some scepticism regarding BPIX polls because their methodology isn't open. Their polls are weighted by past vote, but to what shares we don't know. However, in the past their figures have been broadly in line with other companies, albeit, towards the more "Tory friendly" end of the scale. This one appears roughly in line with Marketing Sciences - the Tory score isn't too different and they too show Labour being pushed down into the mid-twenties.

UPDATE 3: You've probably seen it by now, but for the record that BPIX figures for the Lib Dems is 17%.

UPDATE 4: Just had confirmation that the Marketing Sciences poll was done using the same methodology as ICM, so should be directly comparable.