Four years ago some four million people, one elector in ten, enlisted in Tony's Army, saying that they supported the Labour Party and that they encouraged others to vote Labour without being asked. Only a quarter as many were canvassing others on behalf of John Major's Conservative Party.
Opinion polls measure the electorate's intentions in votes, not in seats. We can — if nothing goes wrong — measure voting intention percentages directly, and would hope to be accurate within our margins of error. But projecting the number of seats that a given share of the votes would give, although it produces a better headline, involves much greater uncertainties, and we rarely have the information we need to produce such figures with anything approaching precision.
The election begins with the most recently published polls* by all the companies showing Labour's lead over the Tories slightly lower than was the case before the election was called in 1997:
In last week's column I set out some of the evidence that suggests that the turnout in the forthcoming election may be even lower than in 1997. However, one aspect that I didn't address was the political impact of a low turnout.
Our poll on the image of the party leaders for The Times this week reveals for the first time in four elections both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are viewed predominantly negatively by the British public.
