Ashcroft poll sends warning to Tories

David Cameron's upbeat manifesto message was tempered by a more ominous one from Lord Ashcroft, as the Tory peer released polling today suggesting Labour was making inroads deep into Conservative territory.

His final round of polling in Conservative-Labour marginals ahead of the general election on May 7 put Ed Miliband ahead in two solid Tory seats. In Crewe & Nantwich, scene of the Tories' biggest by-election triumph in opposition in 2008, Labour is ahead by three percentage points. In Finchley & Golders Green, Margaret Thatcher's former seat, it has a two-point lead. They are the 273rd and 239th most marginal seats in the Commons respectively.

"These seats are striking because they are deep down into Conservative territory," said Mike Smithson, a psephologist and editor of the politicalbetting.com website.

"I would be quite concerned if Labour are really getting down that deep - that is shocking. The Ashcroft polls have shown the Scottish Labour vote is collapsing while Labour is holding up quite well in England and Wales."

Across 10 marginal Conservative-held seats, ranging in marginality from 190th to 273rd, Lord Ashcroft found the Tories ahead in five of the 10 seats. Labour had picked up a lead in three.

If seats such as Crewe & Nantwich do fall to Labour, it flags a national swing of 6 per cent - enough to make it the largest party in the next parliament.

Tory MPs are growing increasingly nervous that the "crossover" moment - where the party takes a decisive poll lead over Labour - may never materialise. "It's not that the campaign is going badly wrong, but to have a sniff of a majority, it needs to go a lot better," one MP said.

<

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

But other pollsters warned against placing too much stress on individual constituency polls. "Lord Ashcroft is doing a great service commissioning so many surveys and placing the tables in the public domain," said Peter Kellner, president of YouGov.

"I would caution, as I suspect would he, against over-interpreting results from individual constituencies. They are harder to get right than national surveys, for much of the demographic and other data necessary to design a good sample is not as detailed or up-to-date as national data."

But with three weeks go, one fact is consistent across of all the marginal seats polled: Labour is having a better ground war in the marginal seats. Between 55 per cent and 78 per cent of voters in the seats polled by Lord Ashcroft have had some contact with Labour, against 34 per cent to 62 per cent for the Conservatives.

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation