The latest set of polls has created some grumblings among Tories, and CoffeeHousers, about the party not being further ahead. Personally, I’m highly sceptical of polls at the moment. British politics has, for obvious reasons, been too unusual in the past few weeks to make a snapshot of opinion that useful. But it is worth pointing that the Tories are ahead by the exactly the same amount in the ICM poll – whose numbers are comparable – as Labour were in August 1996.
The similarities don’t end there: The Guardian also presented its August 1996 poll as good news for the government that was 12 points behind. Here are extracts from its report on that August 1996 poll:
POLL PILES PRESSURE ON LABOUR. By Martin Kettle.
THE Labour high command’s nightmare scenario, a repetition of the 1992 general election defeat, began to take shape yesterday as the latest Guardian-ICM opinion poll confirmed a sustained Conservative come-back.
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