Labour move into six point lead in Ashcroft poll

Lord Ashcroft, the former Tory donor, plans to release a general election voting intention poll every Monday afternoon between now and May next year. His debut poll last week gave the Tories their first lead in over two years – something replicated by two different polling companies since then.

However, things look a little different today:

Labour 35% (+3), Conservatives 29% (-5), UKIP 14% (-1), Lib Dems 9% (NC)

This is a much bigger lead that we’ve been receiving recently, which means it could be an outlier. And we’ll repeat what we said last Monday: “It may be a shock, but it is is still one poll, and one poll does not equal a trend.”

However, at the moment it’s hard to pin a real trend, as the parties numbers are a bit all over the place, as we noted this morning. This is what sense Ashcroft makes of it:

“Ten general election voting intention surveys have been published between last Monday’s poll and today’s. Of those ten, two showed a Tory lead, one was a tie, and seven put Labour ahead. Baffling though this may look, it is not completely inexplicable. Statistics being what they are, and with all polls subject to margins of error, it is likely that these results are scattered around a mean; this currently looks like a very small advantage to Labour, and one which has undoubtedly narrowed since the half-way point in the parliament.”