Look! All this sniping at Jeremy Corbyn is wrong and now we have proof. The Labour leader is not in fact trashing his party’s brand. Today a poll from ICM puts the Conservatives and Labour level on 36 per cent, a jump of four points for the opposition and a drop of three for the governing party.
But before Corbynistas have had a chance to gather up their red flags and take to the sunny streets to celebrate, ICM has already issued a clarification which, in essence, trashes the poll’s finding. You can read the full list of caveats to the poll here, but the key lines are that ‘the headline figures are somewhat misleading, and few should be in any doubt of ICM’s view of our own survey’, and that ‘the word “rogue” is too often used in polling analysis, but in our view it is hard to believe this phone poll will escape such labelling’.
The problems ICM has with its own poll are as follows. The vote shares have been rounded from 36.4 per cent for the Tories and 35.6 per cent for Labour. The pollster has a new method for turnout modelling which it hasn’t yet started using but which ‘alone would have resulted in a three-point Conservative lead on our headline figures’. The pollster also says that its weighting was affected by ‘a sizable and unusual number of 2015 Conservative voters transitioning to Labour on future intentions’.
Still, after weeks of ignoring polling figures and refusing to engage with questions about them at party meetings, this is surely one result that the Corbynites might want to keep talking about for a little while. And the rush to report ICM’s own clarification may simply feed in to the belief amongst Corbyn supporters that there is a great media conspiracy against their leader.
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