Why pro-Boris polls, funded by pro-Boris fans, are cause for concern

Public opinion polls, rather like guns, are powerful weapons which, in the wrong hands or used with insufficient care, can cause more harm than good. If you don’t know what you’re doing, they’re best avoided.

So it is with two recent polls funded by wealthy supporters of Boris Johnson that just happen to purport to show that the Tories would do much better if they replaced Rishi Sunak with Johnson, a view that just happens to echo the views of the newspaper that published the results – and, oh yes, I nearly forgot, used to employ Johnson.

The latest is one funded by Judith McAlpine, a wealthy Conservative activist, who wanted to know the views of people who voted Conservative in 2019.

It asked whom the respondent would rather vote for between Keir Starmer and a range of different Conservative politicians. In such an imaginary head to head, Johnson beats Starmer by 52 per cent to 48 per cent; these must be Johnson’s lucky numbers.

The polling was conducted by Whitestone Insight Limited, a fairly new entrant to the world of voter intentions, and one that does not appear to be a member of the Market Research Society, the industry’s professional body, though it is in the British Polling Council. Its results were published in The Daily Telegraph.

The Whitestone Twitter/X account declared that: “No @Conservatives MP can ignore the stark warning in today’s @WStoneInsight mega-poll in @Telegraph showing <1 in 10 under-45s intend voting Tory and <1 in 5 45-64s. This is an existential crisis for the party.”

That’s not quite the usual style of presentation of results by market researchers – but the fact that few young people declare themselves as Tory voters is fairly well-established and comes as no great surprise. The usual rejoinder is that people drift to the right as they get older, but there’s also been some suggestion that this isn’t as true as it used to be, or was traditionally held to be. “Existential crisis” is still a bit strong, though.

The Telegraph reported that the results showed that the “Tory party under Boris Johnson could regain votes of ‘lost Conservatives’ – former prime minister is only candidate to outperform Rishi Sunak against Labour’s Keir Starmer in new poll”.

Now, there are a few points to make about that, because the actual polling doesn’t quite back that up. The word “could” does quite a lot of heavy lifting, and the sole authority for the claim seems to be McAlpine herself and her affectionate opinion of Johnson. The Telegraph reported that she believed if Johnson led a “new squeaky clean Conservative Party”, the Tories would beat Labour.

She added: “If we have the brains, they’re not evident and that’s because the personality is not there, the charisma is not there. To be a leader, you have to have enormous charisma to be a good leader.” Such conclusions cannot be readily derived from the polling data.

A broader, more pertinent point is that Johnson isn’t going to come back before the election because: he ain’t an MP; Conservative central HQ wouldn’t help him find a seat; he (Johnson) and his party would be liable to lose virtually any by-election; and even if he did somehow magically materialise in the House of Commons, his fellow MPs would not reinstate him, for all the usual well-known reasons.

You could, in other words, produce a poll that suggested that the 2019 voters would be willing to go back to the Tories if Martin Lewis or Carol Vorderman were Tory leader and prime minister instead of Sunak (as emerged from a recent BBC Newsnight focus group) – it’s questionable intelligence of little practical use.

A few weeks ago, there was a similar phenomenon with a YouGov poll associated with the Tory peer David Frost and unknown others. That, too, showed the Tories on course for a terrible defeat (not controversial). But the reporting in the Telegraph and the commentary by Frost made claims that were much more tendentious. So much so, in fact, that YouGov felt obliged to issue a rebuttal – a highly unusual move. YouGov tried to put the record straight, but by then all sorts of canards had been set flying.

For what it’s worth, YouGov is a well-established firm and, after Frost’s survey, issued a corrective: “The Daily Telegraph wrote that ‘In constituencies across England and Wales, the Labour vote is up by an average of just 4 per cent compared to 2019.’ This is somewhat of a red herring. There is a sum using certain notional results whereby the estimated Labour share looks like a mean of a four-point rise on their 2019 performance. However, this is not the correct way to look at either implied national changes nor what is happening at the constituency level.”

And, also with added force now in the context of recent by-elections and similar continuing spin about Reform UK, YouGov also pointed out: “A separate note by The Daily Telegraph suggested that the presence of Reform UK is the difference between Labour securing a majority and not. This is their own calculation using our data and appears to be based simply on adding the Conservative and Reform UK vote shares together in each constituency, which is not a reliable way of measuring their impact.”

YouGov is right about that, and the firm and its colleagues in the Market Research Society really need to have a good look at the use and abuse of opinion polling that, if unchecked, will have a devastating impact on the reputation of the trade and indeed damage our democratic processes via a flood of plausible-sounding but lethal misinformation.

Following that Frost survey, Tory grandee and polling expert Robert Hayward called for tighter rules on opinion polls ahead of a general election. He has since told The Independent that MacAlpine’s newest polling may have backfired.

“The plotting right may be disappointed by the results, because they might have wanted more people to come out ahead of Rishi Sunak. The only person who’s come out ahead of Sunak is someone [Boris Johnson] who’s not an MP,” said Hayward.

He also highlighted Johnson’s divisiveness as another reason why a political comeback was unlikely, adding: “There is no doubt Boris engenders support among people – but he also engenders an enormous amount of opposition.”

Clamping down on voter polls with vested interests, like firearms control, won’t be easy – but the polling industry and the public alike need much stronger protection against the abuse of public opinion.