CITY AND SUBURBAN
Up the poll in the Holy of Holies: why the City gets election wrong
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Iwas in the Holy of City Holies, the Court Room of the Bank of England, when a hand plucked my sleeve and a voice murmured in my ear. Could I confirm that tomorrow's poll in the Daily Thingumbob would show the Conservatives' lead down to two per cent? Word had reached the foreign exchanges at teatime, and Govern- ment stocks had . . . I could only reply that if the Thingumbob was planning to publish a poll, I had no idea what was in it. My inquisitor (a fellow guest) looked at me with the quizzical glance of one experi- enced in asking merchant bankers awk- ward questions and getting evasive answers. The City is poll-happy, or unhap- py, and until election day nothing else will sway the markets. It does not show them at their best. All those batteries of econom- ists and analysts, cackling away in the brokers' and bankers' offices, at their best in discerning new openings in the fluebrush industry, or assessing the influence on the dollar of midwestern house-starts, or re- commending a switch from Unilever plc to Unilever N.V. and back again — elections wrong-foot them. All their specialist know- ledge is suddenly beside the point. They become men in the street, not helped if that is Throgmorton Street, because it is the last place to take a statistically valid straw poll. Received opinions are played back, and re-echo. This helps to explain why (as I was saying last week) the City has so often guessed a general election wrong. It also explains why a self-interested rumour can have such a clear run before fact catches up on it. A political rumour, unlike a financial or commercial rumour, is not quickly verified. The market-makers, who until the other day were vainly trying to shoot down the runaway prices and get some stocks back on their book, can live with this sort of market, and give it the occasional steer themselves. The day after my meeting in the Bank, I picked up the Thingumbob: yes, it carried a poll: no change.
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