Polls Apart Talking of polls, I'm beginning to get a
little worried about the single-constituency polls that have been appearing in the Economist and the Guardian. Both have been carried out by a relatively new firm in the business—A. J. Allen & Associates—and both sets are consistently show- ing either only a small swing to Labour or, in a number of cases, a swing to the Tories. By now so many have appeared that they surely cannot all be special cases; which means that either the well-established national polls—Gallup and NOP—have gone wildly astray, or else (more likely, I'm afraid) there is something seriously wrong with the Economist and Guardian polls. In which case, come April 1, A. J. Allen & Associates may find themselves something worse than April fools. I shall keep my fingers crossed for their sake. Incidentally, it is widely assumed that the Gallup Poll in the Sunday Telegraph provides later information than the NOP in the Daily Mail the previous Thursday. This is not so. While Gallup provides a valuable second opinion, its fieldwork is done over more or less the same period as the previous week's NOP. One up to the Mail for getting in first.
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