Billionaire pollster Lord Ashcroft upsets Tory high command

Lord Ashcroft has a favourite parlour game for those occasions when a select group of Conservative MPs come to his grand townhouse in Westminster for an evening of fine dining and gossiping.

The peer and pollster likes to play word association, presenting the adjectives and descriptions that spring into the minds of voters when they see pictures of Britain's political leaders.

One attendee says: "He shows David Cameron first and it is quite damning: 'Cameron's out of touch, he's not one of us'. Ashcroft doesn't write the script, he is reporting what he finds, but he does delight in tweaking the tail a bit."

His sardonic ribbing of the prime minister is typical of the self-made billionaire, who was once firmly inside Mr Cameron's political tent and is now most certainly not.

"He does it all in a straight-faced way," another Conservative says.

For the prime minister's supporters, Lord Ashcroft has shifted from deputy party chairman in the run-up to the 2010 general election to pantomime villain this time round.

He has been a prominent figure in the Conservative party for more than two decades. But in this election, he has recast himself as an independent pollster after being cut adrift by the party high command after the 2010 election.

The 69-year-old, who made his early millions through cleaning and service companies, has spent - according to one pollster - an estimated £3m of his £1.1bn fortune on the most detailed constituency polling ever seen in a general election for all interested parties to use.

Although national polls are a common feature of media coverage of elections, Lord Ashcroft's constituency polling is a rare commodity in such an unpredictable race. It provides party strategists and tactical voters with an invaluable insight into the shifting moods of the battleground seats that will decide the result.

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"It's not helpful," retorts one senior Conservative cabinet figure, angry that the former party treasurer is now arming the enemy. "He is giving away polling that only we can afford to do to our competitors. It kills our competitive advantage. For a Tory peer to do that, well, it's annoying but he's done it now."

One Conservative who has known him for two decades says: "Michael is somebody who craves respect. He feels a lot of powerful people look down on him because he didn't go to Oxford and he had to earn his money the hard way through office cleaning and buccaneering deals."

A self-made man from a modest background, Lord Ashcroft spent some of his childhood abroad - Malawi and Belize - after his Lancashire-born father joined the Colonial Office.

Lord Ashcroft was entrepreneurial from a young age, embarking on his first "profitmaking exercise" at the age of 12, selling doughnuts to his school friends.

He read business studies at Mid-Essex technical college before going on to start his own cleaning business, building it up through a string of deals to the ADT cleaning and security business that was taken over in 1997 by the US Tyco group.

Involved in the party since the early 1980s, his interest in polling began in 2005 when he funded the target seat strategy for Michael Howard, who was then the party leader.

After Mr Howard's defeat, Lord Ashcroft commissioned research to try to understand why the party had failed to recover from Tony Blair's landslide victory in 1997. His candid pamphlet called "Smell the Coffee; a Wake-up Call for the Conservative party" urged the Tories not to repeat the mistake of preaching to its core vote on issues such as immigration at the expense of appealing to the wider electorate.

He produced a similar examination of the 2010 election - Minority Verdict - where he criticised the party for "failing to convince voters it represented real change".

He has also moved into political publishing as owner of the ConservativeHome blog, Biteback Publishing and Dods. Later this year, Lord Ashcroft is due to publish a "warts-and-all" biography of the prime minister.

One ally says: "He is a businessman who approaches politics with a business approach: he tries to work out how to get elected from the evidence. For a while he did it for the Conservative party and when it became clear his services were not required, rather than packing up - as the Tories probably thought he would - he decided to do it publicly."

It has given him a "cult-like status" among psephologists, as well as respectability after years of being mired in controversy over his tax affairs and his "non-dom" status.

Conservative insiders also believe the peer is motivated by his personal rift with the prime minister and a professional rivalry with Lynton Crosby, the Tory campaign chief.

"I think there is an element of a personal grudge in all of this," says one Conservative figure of the peer's motives. "When the Labour party and Labour press turned on him over this tax issue, he felt he was entitled to be backed up and felt abandoned by Cameron."

Relations deteriorated further in 2012 when Mr Cameron hired Mr Crosby as his campaign chief. Lord Ashcroft published a "seven-point campaign memo" on ConservativeHome in which he reiterated his opposition to the appointment.

"The loathing for Lynton is in excess of his dislike of Cameron," says one party figure who knows both men well.

<>Tim Montgomerie, former editor of ConservativeHome, says: "Rightly or wrongly, Michael thinks Lynton Crosby is charging the Tory party a lot of money for pretty unexceptional advice. He also thinks, because Lynton will win lots of UK private sector business off the back of his work for the Tories, he shouldn't be charging much at all."

But Mr Montgomerie is one Conservative who supports Lord Ashcroft's work, describing him as "the voter's friend".

"So many seats have become confusing three or four-sided marginals. Michael's polls are giving voters the intelligence they need to vote tactically if they want to."

Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, agrees that Lord Ashcroft is providing a worthwhile service, but also warns against "over-interpreting results" from individual constituency polls. "We can be confident in the broad trends - such as the decline of Ukip, and Labour's lead in the ground war - in his latest batch of results from Conservative marginals, but I would be wary of making too much of the precise voting figures in individual seats."

Earlier this year Lord Ashcroft joked that his upcoming book on Mr Cameron was the "obit . . . Ah, sorry David, the biography", in his typical mischievous way.

"Michael has a feline sense of humour and enjoys teasing, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily," says one senior Conservative. But there is serious intent too. "Ultimately Ashcroft wants to prove Cameron and Crosby are running the wrong campaign."

With opinion polls suggesting the Tories will again struggle to secure a House of Commons majority at the general election, many Conservatives may come to agree with Lord Ashcroft's assessment.

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