Grant Shapps dismisses significance of Tory-backed poll suggesting Labour on course for landslide election win – UK politics live

Good morning. News organisations, including the Guardian, tend to be a bit wary of splashing on opinion polls. Polls are never 100% reliable, there is a good case for saying they constrain political reporting (because if journalists assume X can’t win, they don’t cover very seriously what X might do if they were to win), and in 2015, 2016 and 2017 most polls turned out in essence to be wrong, which delivered a big blow to the credibility of the industry.

But politicians have never stopped commissioning and studying them, and recently polling has had a much better record. Newspapers are still a bit cautious about using them, but today the Daily Telegraph is splashing on a YouGov MRP poll saying that Labour is on course to win by a landslide.

To anyone who has read almost any poll over the past year or so, and tried to work out what it would mean for a general election result (the Electoral Calculus seat predictor website is a good starting point) this does not count as news at all. The Telegraph’s YouGov poll says Labour is on course for a majority of 120. It points to Labour winning 385 seats, and many polls recently have suggested Keir Starmer will win by even more. Electoral Calculus’s own figure for Labour MPs after the election is currently 412.

But, still, this one is worth paying attention to, for three reasons.

1) The Telegraph argues it is “the most authoritative’” poll in five years. “Most authoritative” might be pushing it too far, but this seems to be a serious operation. YouGov is a very well respected polling organisation, and the polling is based on a survey of 14,000 people. MRP (multi-level regression and post-stratification) is a technique that uses polling to predict results on a seat-by-seat basis, using detailed demographic data and voting trends, and it is now seen as the polling gold standard. YouGov’s MRP poll before the 2017 general election was the best guide to the result from a polling company (although, because the technique was novel at the time, and untested, YouGov did not publicise it very aggressively). (It’s final MRP poll before the 2019 election was less accurate, predicting a small Tory majority, not a near landslide.)

2) The Telegraph is, in effect, the Conservative party’s in-house newspaper, and today’s splash will puncture the “narrow path to victory” some Tory MPs convey about their election prospects (in public at least).

3) The poll has been published with an agenda. The Telegraph says it has been funded by a group of Tory donors called “the Conservative Britain Alliance”. No one has ever heard of them, but it seems fair to assume they are not Rishi Sunak supporters. The Telegraph also carries a front page article by David Frost, the former Brexit minister, in which he says he was “involved in shaping and analysing” the poll (there is no evidence that Lord Frost has any expertise in psephology). In his article Frost says the only solution for the Tories is to be “as tough as it takes on immigration”.

Tomorrow, MPs will start two days of debate on the Rwanda bill, which will see dozens of rightwingers try to toughen up the bill by making it even less compatible with international law than it already is. The Frost article implies the poll is part of a last-minute lobbying effort to get Sunak to comply with their demands.

All the signs, so far, are that he won’t. It is thought the Tory rebels do not have the numbers to vote down the bill at third reading, on Wednesday evening, but even if Sunak gets his bill through the Commons, he won’t have a united party behind him.

Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, was doing an interview round this morning. Asked about the Telegraph splash, he deployed the usual politician’s response to unfavourable polling, and claimed things might change by the time of the election. He told Times Radio:

If you take a poll now, you are not going to get the same answer as a poll when, for example, things like the tax cut – £450 for a person on the average salary right now – people are feeling that because they have then had it in their pay packet for several months, for example, with inflation at these much lower rates, with growth in the economy. With all of these factors, I think they take time to feed through.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak is on a visit in Essex.

Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in north London.

9.40am: Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, gives a speech at Lancaster House.

10am: Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, holds talks at Hillsborough Castle with the Northern Ireland parties about resuming power sharing.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, speaks about the government’s plans for post-15 educational reform at an event organised by the Bright Blue thinktank.

2.30pm: James Cleverly, the home secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: Rishi Sunak is due to make a statement to MPs on the missile attacks against the Houthis.

And in Wales, junior doctors are starting a three-day strike.

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