As the referendum results flow in, the pollsters will be as nervous as the Brexit and remain campaigns. Having worked hard to scrape the egg of their faces after last year’s general election, they would hate having to do the same again.

As things stand, some pollsters seem certain to be more embarrassed than others. A year ago, their final headline figures were much the same; they were all wrong together. (The experience was especially painful for me, as the then-president of YouGov. On the night, other pollsters could grieve in private. I had to sit for 10 hours in the BBC studio, pretending to stay calm.) This time there have been big variations, both between individual surveys by the same companies and, on average, between polls conducted online and those conducted by telephone.

Monday night was typical – the ORB/Telegraph phone poll showed remain 7% ahead, while the YouGov/Times online poll reported a 2% leave lead. If that difference persists in the final polls, somebody is bound to have awkward questions to answer.

That said, the pollsters’ long-term record is generally outstanding – especially when one takes account of their little secret: that it’s becoming much harder to obtain representative samples. Twenty years ago, telephone polling companies would draw 7,000 random residential telephone numbers; these would yield 2,000 completed interviews. Now they must draw 28,000 numbers. Response rates have collapsed from 30% to 7%.

The problem for online companies is different; but, by definition, they can poll only those willing to join online panels. Pollsters therefore have to extrapolate from the people they can reach to the increasing numbers they can’t reach. The really astonishing thing is not that they got last year’s general election wrong, but that they get so many things spot on.

Their private clients generally know this. Pollsters were obviously nervous following their two big failures to predict Conservative victories, in 1992 and last year. They need not have worried. Business continued to grow. Both elections prompted public embarrassments, not commercial setbacks. One reason is that slight errors in a political contest matter less in market research. In the current referendum a 52-48 decision one way has vastly different consequences from a 52-48 result the other way. But private clients would be perfectly satisfied if predicted market shares for rival brands came within four percentage points of the outcome.

Normally, in fact, polls overcome the technical difficulties they face. My former company, YouGov, has an average error of just over one percentage point on every public event it has tried to predict; other companies have also done well overall. Last month all the polls accurately predicted the scale of Sadiq Khan’s victory in London.

That doesn’t mean that the polls will brush aside bad forecasts in this referendum. Unless their final polls all suddenly converge on the same, correct, prediction, there are bound to be postmortems. These will be especially acute if online polls prove to be clearly more accurate than phone polls – or vice versa.

However, given last year’s polling errors, some people say, forget the polls, watch the betting odds. The money will tell you who’s likely to win. Even when last week’s polls pointed to a clear leave lead, the betting markets still narrowly favoured a remain majority. Interestingly, William Hill reports that two in three punters are betting on Brexit – but two-thirds of the money is plumping for remain. This is because the average remain bet is four times as big as the average leave bet. In the world of democracy, we have one person, one vote; in the world of gambling, it’s one pound, one vote.

The problem with the follow-the-money argument is that the betting markets don’t exist independently of the polls. The sharp changes in the odds in the past fortnight have followed sharp movements in the polls. Much the same happened last summer in Labour’s leadership contest: the bookies made Jeremy Corbyn a rank outsider until YouGov startled the political world by finding him well ahead. Immediately, money and the betting odds flowed in a different direction.

The same things have happened in the currency markets. Sterling fell when the polls showed a shift to Brexit, then rallied on Monday following the weekend polls. As ever, money finds a way to express itself. For the past few weeks, the betting odds have factored in a late move to the status quo. This is what normally happens. It’s not that, when they differ, the polls are “wrong” and the bookies “right”; it’s the difference between measuring what the state of play was yesterday, and predicting what it will be tomorrow.

However, since you ask, yes, I agree with the bookies: a remain victory is the more likely outcome; but, no, I am not betting any money it.