Tories 13 points ahead in ComRes poll
A new ComRes poll for Tuesday's Independent has headline voting intention figures, with changes from last month, of CON 40% (-1), LAB 27% (-6), LDEM 18%(+2) and Others 14%.
The 13 point Conservative lead is the largest recorded for almost twenty years; in the unlikely event that such a whopping swing occured in a uniform fashion at a general election it would produce a Tory majority of 58. It is worth remembering however that ComRes do tend to have the most favourable weighting for the Conservatives (and for 'others') so we should expect them to report larger leads than companies like YouGov and ICM.
The changes in the topline figures match the general trends we've seen elsewhere. Labour are down sharply, the Liberal Democrats are up, benefiting either from the publicity of their leadership election or through Labour's misfortune, the Conservative vote is down very slightly - the same as we saw with BPIX, rather than the sharp drop we saw with ICM. My instinct is that the ICM poll may be a rogue, that the actual picture is that the Conservatives are steady-ish, Labour are down significantly but the Lib Dems (and others) are the beneficaries of their troubles - that is just my own personal judgement through. We've still got YouGov to come this week, Populus early next week and an Ipsos MORI poll at some unspecified point, so we shouldn't have a lack of polls to make judgements on.
