Zia Yusuf@ZiaYusufUK
🚨 Psy-op alert: The Lord Ashcroft "Poll" that was released this weekend is bogus propaganda.
Ashcroft is one of Kemi's biggest donors, and he's partnered with the Tory press to claim that the Tories "closed the gap" with Reform.
It's a total lie.
He's manufactured a non-sensical and non-standard headline voter intention number.
He claims headline voting intention is represented by a convoluted question which asks about each party separately, asking the respondent to rate the likelihood they'd vote for a party out of 100, and then - arbitrarily - discards every score below 50. Except it's not arbitrary, it’s propaganda.
So his concocted "voter intention" question fails to ask respondents to choose between parties, like an actual election, and like proper pollsters.
Except!
He DID actually ask a proper Voting Intention question in this poll, asking the respondent to actually choose between the parties their first choice of government.
The results are in the data tables (screenshot below).
They show the OPPOSITE of what Ashcroft and the Tory press claimed - Reform on 26%, and the Tories on 19%!
*Reform 7 points clear of the Tories*
Almost exactly in line with YouGov.
Note Lord Ashcroft Polling is NOT a member of the British Polling Council (BPC).
This means he does not adhere to the basic levels of transparancy and method that proper pollsters do.
To quote the BPC:
"The principal objective of the Council is to uphold standards of disclosure that ensure that consumers of survey results entering the public domain have an adequate basis for judging the reliability and validity of the results."
Ask yourself why Lord Ashcroft isn't a member.
Because they would not allow members to pull stunts like this!
This man donated £250k to Kemi a year ago, and is a propagandist not a pollster.
Do not take him, or anyone promoting it seriously.
