Ipsos MORI’s monthly political monitor has a much closer race than ICM’s last poll. Topline figures are CON 36%, LAB 35%, LDEM 11%, UKIP 8%, GRN 4% (full tabs are here.)

The poll was conducted over the weekend before Theresa May became Prime Minister, though did include a question on whether people thought she had what it took to be a good Prime Minister (55% of people though she did, 27% did not).

Given it is being rampantly misrepresented on social media, I should also explain about MORI’s turnout filter and how they present their figures (and why, therefore, some people are tweeting entirely different MORI figures!). These days the overwhelming majority of opinion polls contain some sort of adjustment for how likely people are to vote. The general pattern is that older people and middle class people are more likely to vote than younger people and working class people; older people and middle class people are also more likely to vote Conservative, younger people and working class people more likely to vote Labour. This means if a poll just included everyone, with no reference to how likely or unlikely they actually are to vote, then it would overstate Labour when compared to actual election results.

Polling companies account for this by weighting by likelihood to vote (the more likely you are to vote, the more your answer is counted) or filtering by likelihood to vote (only taking people who say they are likely to vote), based either on how likely people say they are to vote, or on demographic modelling. In the case of MORI, their topline figures are based only on people who say they are at least 9/10 likely to vote AND that they always, usually or have sometimes voted in the past. This makes a substantial difference to their topline figures – without this adjustment they would have been showing a five point Labour lead.

MORI’s headline figure is the one that is adjusted for turnout – the one point Conservative lead – which they regard as a better indicator of actual voting intention. However, because MORI’s political monitor has been going since the 1970s they still publish the figures without the turnout adjustment to preserve the data trend, even if they don’t feel it paints an accurate picture in an era of lower turnouts.

In short, if you are looking at Ipsos MORI figures with a view to seeing how well the parties might do in a general election tomorrow, you need to look at the figures that account for how likely people actually are to vote, not take false solace from figures that don’t take turnout into account.