Polling guru John Curtice offers 6 insights into the UK election

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John Curtice, the polling guru and senior fellow with think-tank The UK in a Changing Europe, gave an election analysis to political journalists at Westminster on Thursday.

Sir John is a pre-eminent figure among UK pollsters and one whose analysis is widely followed. Here are six key points that emerged from his briefing.

The state of the polls

To put it bluntly nothing has changed in the past week. The average of the past seven days of polling shows Conservatives have moved up one percentage point (39 per cent); Labour are up one (29); Lib Dems are flatlining (16); and the Brexit party is down two (8), continuing the downward trend for Nigel Farage’s party since Boris Johnson became prime minister.

Where Labour has done well

However, Sir John says we shouldn’t ignore an earlier Labour surge at the back end of October. YouGov’s tracker polls showed Labour surging from 21 per cent to 27 per cent on October 31 just as the election was called. That was the first time that Labour had shown any improvement in the polls since May. It’s “the one big change” in recent polling, he says.

What Johnson needs to win

If the Conservatives maintain their 10 point lead, it’s highly likely that they will get a majority big enough to allow Mr Johnson to get his Brexit deal ratified. However, given the Tories will lose a fair chunk of their 13 seats in Scotland and some others to the Lib Dems in England, he cannot do much worse than that. “The target lead for the Conservatives is probably around 6-7 points. If it falls below that we are looking at a hung parliament.”

Why Scotland matters

What happens in Scotland has become fundamental to British politics. Until 2010, pollsters could ignore Scotland because Labour would win 40 seats north of the border and that was that.

“But,” says Sir John,” the chances of Labour winning a majority (in the Commons) are frankly as close to zero as we can safely say, given they are utterly incapable of winning anything in Scotland.”

The Red Wall is not what it seems

To guarantee a majority, the Conservatives need to win Labour-held seats in the north of England in what is called the “Red Wall”. But Sir John notes that, at the last election in 2017, there was already a big swing by leave voters towards the Conservatives in many of these seats, such as Bishop Auckland and Workington.

So the challenge for the Tories is not to win over more Labour voters: “They already have those voters.” Instead, what’s interesting is that in these seats some 60 per cent of Labour voters voted Remain at the 2016 referendum.

In Sir John’s view, the critical issue now is how many of these Labour voters swing to the Liberal Democrats. If they do, that could reduce Labour’s vote share and allow the Conservatives to come through and win in any seats.

As he puts it: “The battle in the north is: can the Tories hold on to what they had last time? And will enough Remain Labour voters switch to the Lib Dems?”

The irony of Johnson’s position

Sir John accepts that “Boris Johnson would want the Lib Dems to go up” in the polls. This might mean that a few Tory MPs would lose their seats. But the gains in Labour areas, especially in the north, would outweigh those losses for the reason explained above.

The tipping point would only come if the Lib Dems’ share of the vote got anywhere close to the Tory share of the vote. But we are a long way from that.

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