Some words I wrote quite a while ago now circulate around the Internet among Corbynite Labour supporters, in a way that makes me increasingly concerned.

These words are :

‘Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Crack that, and it all makes sense.’

The statement is perfectly true. I can’t actually trace the point when I originally said it, but I don’t dispute having said so. Indeed, I have thought it for many years and am fairly certain that I understood this fact as a result of Michael (now Lord) Dobbs’s clever political thrillers, featuring the monstrous power-hungry Tory Leader Francis Urquhart, immortalised on TV by that fine actor Ian Richardson.

As I recall, some of his characters are portrayed as using opinion polls in the ways in which I describe. This is a good way of making the point. I doubt if any real politician would ever be caught in public saying such things.

Lord Dobbs, I should stress, knows what he is writing about. He worked at a very high level in Conservative Central Office in the late Thatcher era.

What he portrayed, as I remember, was politicians devising polls on certain subjects to give the impression of public support (or disdain) for certain ideas. This could partly be obtained by leading the polled individual to a conclusion through a chain of questions which subtly pushed or pulled him or her one way or another.

The media, which tend to treat polls as oracles, would then publish the results as if they were wholly impartial measures, and the public (who are not immune to the desire to belong to the crowd) would be influenced in their opinions, about large matters of which they in fact knew little).

I believe, though I have only seen a YouTube clip, a similar idea was explored long ago in an episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

In both dramas, political or civil service figures are shown devising questions which will manipulate those who are being polled, or which were devised and commissioned to influence [public opinion rather than to reflect it.

But when I say ‘It all makes sense’, what sense does it make?

Please grasp that it is nothing so crude as ‘all polls are rigged and they are not telling the truth’. I am absolutely not saying anything so daft. The basic research work in opinion polls conducted by the major organisations is sound. It has to be. Their main work is done not for politicians but for businesses seeking to sell their products. They need to be right, or they will be put out of business. Often what you need to watch is not the polls, but how they are presented.

I first applied the Dobbs theory in practice in the years before the 2010 election. I was quite sure that the Tories would not win that election. Indeed, my whole political position at the time (that proper conservatives should boycott the Tory Party) depended partly on that fact. Some people objected that it was wrong to help the other side win. I personally couldn’t have cared less, as I regarded the (then) New Labour and Cameron Tory Parties as indistinguishable Blairites. But in fact boycotting the Tories wasn’t going to do that. If they couldn’t win anyway, then there was no need to worry that a boycott would prevent a Tory victory. You can’t prevent something that isn’t going to happen.

Yet mainstream media kept publishing polls or running reports which implied or claimed that the Tories were on course for a smashing victory. As far as I could make out on election night, the BBC’s cameras and resources were poised for a Tory victory and an immediate Cameron drive to London for an early visit to Buckingham Palace, which of course did not take place because Gordon Brown hung on in Downing Street until a Tory-Lib Dem coalition was certain.

During the long period in which Tory supremacy was assumed, in left and 'right’ wing media alike, I contacted the polling organisations involved, and they kindly and generously supplied me with the actual data on which the media were basing these claims. What these showed was that the headline figures were leaving out huge numbers of abstainers and don’t knows, and so portraying a Tory vote of around 30% of the total as a huge winning surge. I can’t recall all then other details, but it was plain that the raw fieldwork was nothing like as good news for the Tories as the headlines suggested. I also knew from personal information that the Tory Party organisation in actual constituencies was decrepit beyond belief, membership having collapsed so that there simply weren’t the activists who had once got out the vote. What I didn’t know is what has recently been investigated (about visiting ‘battlebuses’ full of young people) by the Electoral Commission, the Police and Crown Prosecution Service, and been found to more or less OK under electoral law. I’m unsure how developed this was in 2010. It was highly developed in 2015

The same lack of a real Tory surge was clear from local election results which were also misrepresented ( a lot of this was laziness and incuriosity, mingled with conformism, rather than an active political involvement) as being far more healthy for the Tories than they really were. The intention of this was to encourage more people to join the winning side, and I imagine it did so to some extent.

Even so, I was one of the few people on election night in 2010 who was completely unsurprised when David Cameron did not get a majority.

I was mistaken when I made the same prediction about 2015. I firmly believe this was because of the use, on a scale never seen before, of the methods I mention above and have discussed at length elsewhere, which turned out to be *too* effective, as I am quite sure that Mr Cameron never intended to get a majority.

But the point remains. Polls can be misused, misinterpreted and misunderstood. But the basic facts they reveal, carefully studied, are truthful. If their predictions are wrong it is because opinions change, or because of factors they have been unaware of . What I said about polls was never intended to be a blanket dismissal of their significance, and people should stop using it as such.