POLITICAL COMMENTARY

The old polls act

PETER PATERSON

Who is the most significant person in British politics this week? Who makes Westminster tremble, disrupts question time in the House of Commons, causes the midnight oil to be burned in Smith Square offices, puts a seraphic smile on the face of some poli- ticians, and wipes the grin off the faces of their rivals?

Who indeed, but Mrs Angela X (I am not at liberty to divulge her full name), who lives with her cost-accountant husband and 2.5 children of school age in a semi-detached suburb of a Midlands city. This column does not go in for muck-raking, so let me say at once that Mrs X is not having an affair with anyone prominent in political

life (or anyone else for that matter), al- though her activities might set tongues

wagging among her more inquisitive neigh-

bours. For Mrs X is an interviewer with an opinion poll, a part-time job that re- quires her to solicit people in the street for their opinions, or to pay frequent noc-

turnal visits to homes other than her own.

Mrs X is not at present in the spotlight, because few politicians, as yet, have de- veloped more than a passing interest in the methods used by the half-dozen major opinion polls now operating in the British market, although they are fascinated enough by their results. Nevertheless she represents a weakness—the human element, if you like —that can feed the cynicism many people feel towards the whole concept of political opinion polling, and, in extreme cases, she

could be responsible for a margin of error creeping into the results, causing distortions which might themselves have their own real- life political repercussions.

Most of Mrs X's time is spent asking people questions about quite ordinary com- mercial products: what they think of a particular brand of washing powder, for example, or whether they prefer Peruvian to Mongolian cheddar. Pin-point accuracy is not really necessary for such an exercise. Her job, as one tiny cog in a large machine, is to help establish that people have prefer- ences in the matter of cheese and thus en- able the Mongolians or the Peruvians to plan bigger advertising budgets or more attractive packaging for their produce. If the day seems long, and it's raining, and she knows her husband is waiting at home for his supper, Mrs X could conceivably cheat a little by pretending to have interviewed the number of people she was supposed to interview, and perhaps her husband might even kindly help her to fill out her questionnaires.

Her employers, of course, appoint super- visors to make spot checks on Mrs X's inter- views, and if she is caught cheating she will lose her part-time job. They are even stricter when Mrs X goes out and about seeking to know how people will vote at the next elec- tion, what they think of Mr Wilson as Prime Minister and Mr Heath as leader of the Con- servative party, and all the other questions that go to make up a political poll. But no one in politics knows how long Mrs X could go on cheating before she •Nas caught, or what effect this malfeasance might have on the poll that employs her. And what if her motive for falsifying the returns is not domestic but political?

I am not, of course, suggesting that opinion polls are not to be trusted because they em- ploy unreliable part-time interviewers, or

even that the interviewers are unreliable. Merely that we do not know, beyond the limited information the polling organisations themselves care to disclose, very much at all about a process that has become a vital ele- ment in political life. How are the inter- viewers selected? What educational stan- dards are required? Does the poll inquire about the pollster's politics? What is the ratio between interviewers and supervisors? How much back-checking is done to ensure accuracy and reliability?

Certainly we are already given some essen- tial information. We know that some polls use the random and some the quota sampling method: we are normally told the 'fieldwork' date or dates, on which the information, is collected, and we roughly know the size of the sample. But by the very nature of things, people are bound to want to know more about polls which, given the same political atmosphere to work in, can still come up with widely varying versions of what the public's voting intentions are.

April 1970 was not a good month for the pollsters—and the maddening thing is that no one will ever be able to determine which of them was right and which were wrong-. Using the Evening Standard poll, conducted by Opinion Research Centre, as a pre-Budget base line (interviewing was carried out dur- ing the first week of April) we started the month with a Tory lead of 6 per cent—noth- ing out of the ordinary, but confirming a steady decline in Conservative fortunes. In fact, the Opposition lead in this poll had been reduced by a half since the beginning of the year. The Gallup Poll, published in the Daily Telegraph, demonstrating a similar pattern of Conservative decline, still man- aged to give them a lead over Labour of 44 per cent, although interviewing took place following Mr Jenkins's Budget. The Harris Poll. in the Daily Express, also polled im- mediately after the Budget, giving Labour a 2 per cent lead. A third post-Budget poll, Marplan in the Times, also gave Labour the lead, but by the slender and arithmetically indefensible margin of 0.8 per cent.

National Opinion Polls postponed their poll apparently to allow opinion to settle down after the immediate excitement created by the Budget. Such an unexciting Budget, one would have thought, was hardly worth the delay, particularly since its neutrality had been widely forecast in advance. This, how- ever, may be why mPs and others were so surprised by those polls which produced a Labour lead : sophisticates were able to guess that the Chancellor would give a little away and take even less away, but the wider public was, as usual cringing with fear beforehand, and some polls recorded their relief at, for once, not having to pay higher taxes.

But, again, why the disparity between Gallup and Harris, Harris and Marplan, Marplan and NoP? In the wide sweep of eternity, it probably is not important, but if each crop of results is to be treated with the hysteria that has greeted these figures, surely someone, sometime is going to de- mand to see the books of the polling ottani- sations. `Ah,' said one veteran MP this week, `it was all so much better in the old days when we only had Gallup to cope with.

Once we had seen that it was reasonably accurate in predicting general election results, we tended to trust it all the way alone the line.' Today, with competing polls giving differing results. the whole thing has become something of an irritant. Mid-term poll find- ings, of course. do not matter very much, but in a situation where a government is in pro- cess of making up a Prime Minister's mind about whether to make a dash for freedom or whether to hold on for a bit longer. opinion poll contradictions reinforce Prime Ministerial indecision.

Not that Mr Wilson has much to complain about. Indecision is natural to him, and mean- while he can take comfort from other indica- tors of opinion and enjoy the state of jitters into which the polls have put the Opposition.

The Prime Minister likes, publicly, to pre- tend that the polls do not exist (Hansard, 23 April. col 633. The Prime Minister: `I never comment on opinion polls.' An Hon. Mem- ber: 'Indeed?'). In fact, he is fascinated by them, as behoves a member of the Royal Statistical Society, and he is capable of in- vesting such disclaimers, particularly in the House of Commons. with as much emotional force as Sir John Gielgud would bring to a play if. by some misfortune, his only line was 'My lord, the carriage waits.'

Mr Heath, too, likes to insist that he has more to do than to spend his time looking over his shoulder at the state of the opinion polls. Both leadership attitudes, however, are devices to still a wildly beating heart, and to guard against either jubilation or gloom which has to be reversed a month later. Be- hind them, the morale of their cohort tends to follow every rise and fall in the pollsters' graphs. and the findings of a particular poll on a particular day may be gauged from the noise level on the back benches at question time.

Some polls, of course, have more impact than others. Marplan, in the Times, appears

tvnly once a quarter and therefore needs to be promoted with three times the verve of its monthly rivals. The fact that a longish inter-

val passes between Marplan polls makes it simpler for the Times to present its find- ings as `dramatic' and 'sensational'. Presenta- tion may not be everything, but when the opinion polls become powerful circulation boosters (as they should be. since they cost their sponsoring papers up to £20,000 a year) their display becomes important.

The polls contribute a great deal to poli- tics. They stimulate interest and discussion. they may even, in some circumstances, in- fluence election results (everyone seems to have a favourite example of this), although they fade astonishingly quickly in the pre- sence of a real election result. No one, of course, can ignore flesh and blood results like the Greater London Council election in Hammersmith this week, conducted not by anonymous Mrs X's but by real, live voters. Nor, however, should politicians underesti- mate the importance of the polls on their lives and fortunes, which is why it is surpris- ing that there is not more agitation for the polling organisations to be governed by a single professional institution (the Market Research Society concentrates on commer- cial rather than political polling) with en- forceable standards and a code of ethics.