Tories in a spin over You Gov’s Sun Polls

Seen as the Conservatives are on course to at least be the biggest party in a new Parliament, if not win outright, its perhaps surprising that there is so much nashing of teeth about You Gov’s daily tracker polls for The Sun newspaper, they started a few weeks ago and have shown small Conservative leads which had lead to accusations by Conservatives of Labour bias from YouGov.

Apparently the Telegraph’s Robert Winnett is going to run a story tomorrow about the inconsistencies and other issues that have raised about YouGov, Peter Kellner of YouGov reply is already on the website and part of it is below :-

It starts ‘For eight years YouGov conducted regular surveys for the Daily Telegraph. These helped to establish YouGov’s reputation as Britain’s most accurate polling company – not only in the 2005 general election, but in the Conservative leadership elections of 2001 and 2005, and in last June’s Euro-elections.

YouGov parted company with the Daily Telegraph a few weeks ago, when we agreed a deal with News International to supply daily polls to The Sun and Sunday Times.

This week, Robert Winnett, a member of the Telegraph’s political staff, emailed me saying that he planned to write an article about YouGov in tomorrow’s newspaper. Below are Winnett’s comments and questions in full, and my replies.

And finishes ‘One final point. This is not the first time our critics have attacked our methods. The last time was in April 2008, when Ken Livingstone at least had the decency to put his name to the criticism. He threatened to complain to the Market Research Society, saying our mayoral polls (which showed Boris Johnson consistently ahead) were wrong, because all other polls put him ahead or, at worse, neck-and-neck. In the event, our final poll, for the Evening Standard, was exactly right (Boris 53%, Ken 47%). Ken never pursued his complaint.

This time it seems our critics are sheltering behind the cowardly screen of anonymity.

You might also recall that our final poll in last year's Euro-elections for the Telegraph was almost exactly right, and closer to the result than any other company's polls.'

Given the Telegraph's proud history of impartial and rigorous news reporting, I look forward to you providing a fair and balanced story!

It looks like there is some history between YouGov and the Telegraph, but as YouGov are doing the Tories private polling this story could potentially do them more harm than good.

UPDATE Here is the Telegraph's piece.Any source