Worcester's Weblog

MORI chairman Sir Robert Worcester analyses the latest opinion poll data.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are 'newest bestest friends' these days. Not only have they been shocked by the fragility of the voting intentions of the British public for the general election, they are worried about the solidity of opposition to Britain ratifying the European constitution.

They won't have been best pleased with the results in February of the latest MORI/Citigroup bi-monthly monitor of support or opposition to Britain signing up to the European constitution. Then only 31 per cent of the British public said they supported the idea of Britain adopting the new European constitution and over half, 52 per cent, said they opposed it.

And they won't be sanguine with the views expressed in our survey of corporate financial officers from April 1 to 7 for the FT. Among financial directors and their colleagues, from the smallest companies to the largest, two in three people said they are either 'generally opposed' (38 per cent) or 'strongly opposed' (30 per cent), some 68 per cent in all.

My view is that there is just an outside chance that a re-elected Labour government can win a referendum on the European constitution -- on four conditions. First, that the British vote is at the end of a long string of other countries strong endorsements. The Spaniards have done so. France is a different case, and the latest polls show that 54 per cent of the French public intend to vote no on May 29. And if it goes down in France, it takes the rest of the EU with it.

Second is that it is presented as a limiting, not an enabling constitution. I can hear it now: "We've got them in a box they can't escape from!"

Third, that Blair and Brown are glued together in selling it to the British public, and most importantly to business, the City, and economists.

Fourth, that the third condition works. For while half the public tells us that they trust Gordon Brown to tell the truth, only a third trust Blair. And while they weren't asked specifically in this poll, I suspect that among financial directors, not to mention the City and senior businessmen, the gap is even wider. Ministers need the support -- active support -- of captains of industry, the City establishment and the financial community telling the public that not to sign up would be bad for business. Far more of the public will trust them than trust even politicians as exalted as the prime minister and the chancellor.

For the financial director poll found that while there is majority opposition to Britain signing up to the EU constitution, they are open to persuasion.

MORI asked not whether they are supportive or opposed, but whether the directors 'strongly' supported the idea or not. Only four per cent did support it strongly, while 30 per cent said they strongly opposed it.

On those figures it would seem doomed, and they are the core vote.

But where there is hope is that another 26 per cent said they were 'generally in favour... but could be persuaded against if I thought it would be bad for Britain', making 30 per cent potential voters at least leaning towards voting yes.

Another 38 per cent said they were 'generally opposed, but could be persuaded in favour...'. So if they could be persuaded, they could deliver a majority in support.

They in turn, if supportive, and few are now, could be used to persuade others in the wider corporate community to back a yes vote.

Here, counter-intuitively, there is a almost no margin of difference between respondents by size of their companies: 69 per cent of companies with fewer than 50 employees are opposed, as are 67 per cent of SMEs (50 to 500 workers), and 66 per cent of those in companies with 500 and over staff.

MORI interviewed 200 UK CFOs and financial controllers by telephone from April 1 to 7, 2005.

UPDATE:

Since Sunday, six polls have been published, one each by NOP (Independent), ICM (Mirror), MORI (Observer / Sunday Mirror) and two by YouGov (Sunday Times and Telegraph).

In keeping with my advice to look not at the gap, but at the Opposition (Tory) share, note the difference between the findings. All fieldwork done between April 7 and 11: YouGov 35 to 36 per cent, the others with 32 to 34 per cent.

Yet the gap is from zero to seven -- an illustration of how the different ways of methodology, certainty of voting, weighting, margin of error, and perhaps to a small degree timing (and other factors which I hope to return to later in the week) affect small differences in share to be magnified by the media's focus on reporting the lead.

New polls are expected by MORI and ICM this week, Populus on the weekend. And YouGov, of course.

Data courtesy of the excellent www.pollingreport.co.uk