Inside No. 10’s battle of the pollsters

There was plenty for Rishi Sunak and his cabinet to discuss on Tuesday morning. The Conservatives had lost half of the seats they defended in the local elections and Andy Street narrowly lost the West Midlands mayoralty to Labour. ‘We’re doomed,’ was one cabinet member’s verdict. Ben Houchen’s victory in Teesside was just enough to stop any serious move against the Prime Minister: he is safe until the general election.

Isaac Levido, the Australian political strategist who ran the Tories’ successful 2019 campaign, did his best to fight off a sense of defeatism. He briefed the cabinet that this year’s election race is much closer than commentators and opinion polls suggest. Look at Dudley, he said. Keir Starmer had kicked off his campaign there saying he was ‘looking to win’. He used his final campaign visit to go to Harlow to make the same point. Yet Labour failed to take control of either council. Something was not going according to Labour’s plan.

Levido went on to argue that an election in which almost four million people voted offered a better sample than any focus group, than any opinion poll. And in that vote, there was not a 22-point Labour lead as some opinion polls had suggested. Instead, both the BBC and Sky had found the projected national vote share was a nine-point lead for Labour. Such a lead could easily narrow during a general election campaign. Michael Thrasher, the doyen of local election psephologists now used by Sky News, said that the evidence points to a hung parliament.

The BBC’s John Curtice had a bleaker reading of the same numbers. He said the results point to ‘a very comfortable Labour majority’, because local elections in England and Wales don’t take into account a Labour recovery in Scotland or other factors such as anti-Tory tactical voting in a general election.