What first poll in Nadine Dorries’ seat tells us, plus its caveats

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Good morning. Game over for the Conservatives in Mid Bedfordshire? The first poll of the contest to replace Nadine Dorries has delivered them grim reading. Exciting reading for me though, because it’s a good opportunity to talk nerdily about a favourite topic of mine: the challenges for opinion pollsters nationwide and in constituency polling in particular. Some more on that in today’s note.

Caveats, get your caveats!

The first opinion poll of the Mid Bedfordshire parliamentary by-election is out and the Conservatives are on course for defeat.

Here are the scores on the door:

Now, I hope you like caveats because I have a lot of them. Yes, in many ways this poll result is wholly unsurprising. We know that the Conservative party is in a whole heap of trouble nationwide because of a series of overlapping economic and social crises. Voters tend not to like unnecessary by-elections and they don’t get more unnecessary than this one.

But constituency polling is really hard and its record is, well, mixed. It struggles with the same thing that national polling does: the difficulty of avoiding sampling too many politically engaged people and under-sampling the less politically engaged and voters who are harder to reach.

In the Wakefield by-election last year, a poll by JL Partners (spreadsheet here) overestimated the support for the Liberal Democrats and underestimated that for Akef Akbar, a Conservative councillor turned independent. In the 2021 Batley and Spen by-election, pollster Survation overestimated the support for Conservative and Labour parties and underestimated the level of backing for George Galloway, running for his third political party, Workers Party GB.

And in Hartlepool, Survation overestimated the level of support for Thelma Walker, an ex-Labour MP standing with the support of the Northern Independence party, while underestimating the support for Samantha Lee, a local businesswoman. A similar pattern can be seen in the general election constituency polling by Survation for the Economist, overestimating, for instance, the level of support for Plaid Cymru in Wrexham.

The commonality here is that in different ways, these polls were overestimating the number of politically engaged people.

Given that constituency polling tends to be wrong in fairly predictable ways, I see no compelling argument here to dispute this poll’s finding as far as the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are concerned — other than the important caveat that 4 per cent is not a large lead. If I were a Conservative or Labour strategist looking at this poll, my feeling would be that it is all to play for.

But the rest of the poll is more interesting. I would be happy with this poll if I were Gareth Mackey, the chair of Central Bedfordshire council and one of the independents who now runs the local authority. His numbers look plausible given how well the independents did in the elections this May. Given the struggle that pollsters tend to have picking up the support for these localised independents, I would feel in his shoes that it is plausible that I could win this election.

What isn’t plausible to me is the 10 per cent poll rating for Reform. This would be its best ever performance in a parliamentary by-election since it abandoned its old branding as the Brexit party.

As long-term readers will know, I am sceptical about Reform’s polling. I meet disillusioned voters who say things a lot like Reform all the time: but I am yet to meet a single one who then actually says they are voting for the Reform party. I continue to think that as long as Richard Tice is the leader of the Reform party, it is not going to make much of a splash electorally.

What all of this taken together says to me is: yes, the Conservative party is in deep trouble nationwide at the moment. That political plight is sufficiently bad that Labour has a chance of beating them even in a by-election in very blue territory such as Mid Bedfordshire. But I wouldn’t rule out that we may wake up to an even bigger shock in the shape of a win for the independent candidate.

Now try this

I had a lovely weekend at my in-laws celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. On the train back I caught up with the FT Weekend, and particularly enjoyed Danny Leigh’s essay on what Disney’s turbulent past says about its troubled present and Ed Luce’s lunch with Chris Christie. I enjoyed this selection of culinary experts on the foods they hate, and was relieved to learn that Margot Henderson and I share a dislike.

Top stories today

• Starmer’s ruthless streak | Keir Starmer faces claims he is engaged in a “witch-hunt” aimed at closing down dissent or independent voices inside Labour. John McDonnell, who was shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn in 2015-20, criticised “factional behaviour”.

• Infra-dead | The crisis at Thames Water could deter overseas investment into the UK, ministers and industry figures have warned. “Making a decision to invest in Thames is getting harder anyway because returns on infra in the US are significantly higher than in the UK,” said John Reynolds, chief executive of Castle Water.

• Tory donor accused of silencing Margaret Hodge | Mohamed Amersi has been accused of using bullying legal threats to suppress a report by the veteran Labour MP Margaret Hodge, which alleged he was “mired in an international corruption scandal”, the Guardian’s Haroon Siddique reports.

• Super-teachers | Groups of super-teachers will help to turn around struggling schools, under Labour plans to be unveiled this week, the Daily Mirror reports.

  New improvement teams will target poorer areas as figures show ­children from those backgrounds are almost twice as likely to go to an ­inadequate school.