Waiting for YouGov
Despite the Crewe and Nantwich by-election's impact on the media's view of politics, we are still awaiting the first poll since the by-election. The result of the by-election came too late for a full poll in time for the last week's Sunday papers, and it looks as though all the pollsters avoiding doing anything over a bank holiday weekend immediately after a big by-election win, which could potentially have produced some real comedy figures.
We are finally getting close to some figures though, as we should have YouGov's monthly poll for the Telegraph either late on tonight or (if the Telegraph publish on Saturday) tomorrow night. The last YouGov poll had a 20 point Tory lead - the by-election may have had a further "aura" effect on the Tories, or Gordon Brown may have been further damaged by the leadership speculation around him. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where Labour are down to a hardcore of support where bad publicity can't really hurt them much more. Feel free to hazard some guesses in the comments below.
In the meantime, here's a round up of some other recent polls. YouGov's monthly inflation expectation tracker for Citybank shows that the average expectation of the inflation figure in 12 months time is now 4.1%, the highest they have found since the tracker began in 2005.
A Populus poll for the Movement of Reform Judaism found 73% of Christians think God is male (some of the reporting also included figures for Muslims, Hindus and so on, but these were based on pathetically small numbers of respondents - 13 Muslims, 11 Hindus and so on, so are best ignored). 42% of people, including 53% of Christians, thought it was right to refer to God solely as "He", with 31% (including 28% of Christians) disagreeing.
Finally, the British Polling Council has ruled on the complaint against MORI about a Transport for London poll that they refused to release the tables for prior to the mayoral election. The BPC ruled that MORI should have released the tables, and advised that BPC members in future should review their contracts to make sure they didn't conflict with the BPC disclosure rules (implying that MORI's problem was their contract with TfL didn't allow them to release the figures). The tables are up on MORI's website here. Why Transport for London were so sniffy about letting MORI release them is a mystery to me, the questions are just as laid out in the information that TfL had published, and the cross-breaks don't reveal anything nefarious, or indeed, particularly interesting.
