As the pace of the election build-up has temporarily slowed, let us take the chance to look over the details of the battlefield - that is, the minds of the British electorate.
Sir Robert Worcester wrote this article for the April issue of Parliamentary Monitor before the postponement of the election from the expected May 3 was announced. Now we know that the Reuters 'Experts' were wrong even on the prediction of the election date, where he agreed with them, his remarks on the reliability of the pundits seem more relevant still.
MORI's political polls frequently include a question asking respondents how they voted at the last general. However, although the responses are useful to us in a number of ways, we do not expect them to be an entirely accurate reflection of how the respondents did, in fact, vote. Consequently the responses of a representative sample will NOT normally match the actual result of the last election, and the fact that a sample's recalled vote differs from the election result is not evidence that the sample is unrepresentative.
There is little in this week's MORI poll for The Times [Political Attitudes in Great Britain for March 2001] which should discourage Tony Blair from calling the general election next week, should he wish to do so, for fear of the political effects. It is true that the public seems profoundly unimpressed with the government's handling of the Foot and Mouth crisis, and that opinion on this issue has deteriorated over the last week (69% were dissatisfied with the way the Government is handling the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the Times poll, conducted on 22-27 March, compared with 52% dissatisfied on 15-17 March when we polled for the Mail on Sunday [FOOT AND MOUTH POLL]). But this dissatisfaction has not fed through into any adverse change in voting intentions: Labour's share is 50%, as it was in January and February.
Should he or shouldn't he? Tony Blair still seems determined to call the election for 3 May, though he has yet to make any announcement; the public seem decidedly less enthusiastic. Nevertheless, MORI's poll for the Mail on Sunday [FOOT AND MOUTH POLL] suggested that few of those opposed to holding the election on 3 May feel that if the government were to do so it would make them less likely to vote Labour.
As we wait to discover whether the election will indeed be held on the apparently pre-ordained date of 3 May, or whether the ravages of Foot and Mouth disease will eventually force a postponement, a bit of electoral trivia in answer to a question that I was asked last week. Which is the most typical constituency in the country?
So now we know - or do we? The referendum on joining the Euro, according to some newspapers' interpretations of the Prime Minister's answer to a question in the Commons, will be held in the first two years of the next Parliament. That wasn't what he said.
The spread of foot-and-mouth disease through the rural areas has brought the rural vote back to the top of the election agenda - although, at the same time, it has thrown into some doubt whether there will be an election at all when we have all been confidently expecting it, on 3 May. I have already written [Rural Voters - 20 October 2000] about how much smaller and less influential the rural vote is than almost everybody supposes. But even some of those rural areas are simply rural in the sense of not being urban; they are not full of farmers. The genuinely agricultural vote is smaller still.
