One of Britain’s leading pollsters has written to the Prime Minister to rebuke him for misleading his supporters over whether the Conservative Party would suffer in the polls if they legislated on gay marriage. The Spectator has seen an incredible exchange of letters between the Prime Minister, the former Welsh Secretary, Cheryl Gillan, and Andrew Hawkins, the CEO of the polling company ComRes.
Since being sacked in September, Gillan has become one of the Prime Minister’s more vocal critics and recently slammed the government’s gay marriage proposals. Responding to Gillan in a letter that was then leaked to the Pink News, David Cameron relied heavily on polling data from ComRes to claim that legalising gay marriage would make more people vote Conservative.
However, Hawkins has now accused the Prime Minister of misinterpreting his polling data and thus misleading the public:
‘Your letter of 19 October 2012 to The Rt Hon Cheryl Gillan MP states that “a recent poll by ComRes found that 10 percent of current Conservative voters say that the policy [to legalise same-sex marriage] would make them ‘less likely to vote Consen/ative’ compared with 7 percent saying it would make them ‘more likely to vote Conservative’.
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