DIARY
DOMINIC LAWSON Next time I want to know who will win a general election I shall consult Jeffrey Bernard. About two weeks before polling day our Low life. correspondent placed £1,000 on the Conservatives to win with an overall majority. So confident was Jeff about the outcome that he left for Aus- tralia without waiting to see his horse romp home. Or I might consult Michael Trend. our former home affairs editor. By estimat- ing that the Conservatives would win with an overall majority of 21 seats, he was unbeatable in the Daily Telegraph office sweepstakes. It wasn't just money that Michael won last Thursday. He also became the Member of Parliament for Windsor and Maidenhead with a majority of 13,000. Such an uncanny gift for fore- casting the outcome of votes should make the new MP a natural for the Government Whips Office.
Iknow of only one other person who guessed — or rather estimated — exactly the extent of the Conservative victory. This feat of prescience comes from a most unlikely source. The man in question is the chairman of a public opinion poll company. Step forward, Mr Bob Worcester of Market Opinion and Research International. Two days before the election, news reached me of a private City lunch in which Mr Worcester made his unerring prediction of a Conservative majority of 21. I was some- what surprised, therefore to see that Mori's own final opinion poll, published on the morning of the election, forecast a Labour lead of 1 per cent over the Conservatives. This week I put the discrepancy to the charming Mr Worcester. 'Yes,' he admit- ted, '1 was a hit uneasy when I saw the results of our final poll.' So uneasy indeed that, as he told me, he placed money at William Hill on the Conservatives to win with an overall majority of between 20 and 25, at odds against of 14 to one. I am sure that those, who on the basis of Mori's pub- lic projection placed money on Labour being the largest single party, will not begrudge Mr Worcester his windfall. After the events of last week, the income of opin- ion poll companies is likely to head in the same direction as that of Mr Neil Kinnock.
0 r perhaps it won't. One of the most bizarre aspects of the great opinion poll debate is that the newspapers, while denouncing the pollsters, continue to pub- lish articles based entirely on yet more polls. For example, page 15 of last week's Sunday Times, carried two pieces. One was entitled 'Pollsters now need to answer a few questions'. In the other, Ivan Fallon, the deputy editor, threatens the Sunday
Times Mori election panel which forecast a Labour victory: 'unless they are repeatedly and consistently lying, these people will tell us why they have changed their voting intentions.' Yet on the facing page 14, there is an enormous piece explaining how everybody voted on 9 April, by age, by sex, by income, by property bracket, you name it. And how does the Sunday Times know all these things? We are told that all the information is 'taken from an aggregate analysis of 22,727 voters in Great Britain interviewed by Mori during the election, weighted to the actual outcome.' I love that last bit.
There were some unhappy faces at the election night party held at the Savoy by our proprietor, Mr Conrad Black. They were owned by the champagne socialists or gauche caviare, as the French have it. Although I was sure that the g.c. had showed up in anticipation of witnessing the public humiliation of the cream of British conservatism, I still felt some pity as I saw them dejectedly ordering yet another con- soling glass of champagne, yet another comforting plateful of lobster. I wanted to say something to cheer them up, but I could find few crumbs of comfort other than those surrounding the goujons of Dover sole. It was at 4.30 in the morning, as I went up to my suite on the fourth floor, that I had an esprit d'escalier. The cham- pagne socialists could yet triumph over
'Thank heavens that's over — now we can close down the school.' Conservative greed and self-centredness! All they have to do is to work out the extra tax and national insurance they would have paid under Labour's redistributive policy, and donate it to the Treasury. That is what Labour would have done. Or, if they want- ed to be more specific, they could send the money, as regularly as PAYE, to their local NHS hospital or Education Authority. I wish, I wish, I had thought of that while the election results were pouring in: I am sure the suggestion would have brought smiles back to the faces of the Savoy socialists, and the party would have gone with even more of a swing.
Nothing enlivens a newspaper's letters page more than a good feud. Still more compelling is a family feud. In recent days the Guardian has shown the way. In last Saturday's edition David Marquand, Pro- fessor of Contemporary History at Salford University, former Labour MP and author of, among many, many other things The Unprincipled Society and The Progressive Dilemma published an article on the elec- tion which began, 'So fear triumphed over hope .. . a bemused and troubled nation decided, at the last moment, to cling to nurse.' Professor Marquand went on to denounce 'the Conservatives' role as vehi- cle and orchestrator of a strange, strangu- lated English nationalism.' Perhaps Profes- sor Marquand now regrets these words even more than the events which provoked them: four days later the Guardian pub- lished the following letter from a Ms Diana Marquand of St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex: 'I am always amused to read my brother's articles in your paper. His political analysis of 11 April was a case in point: a pleasantly composed piece of rhetoric designed to blame his own misreading of the intention of the British electorate on their deplorable cowardice. I am but a poorly paid social worker and unable to afford the luxurious, leisured lifestyle and consequent social prestige of the neo-left intelligentsia. But I am closer to the electorate . . . I meet more "ordinary voters" than a university pundit has hot dinners: they are neither stupid nor lacking in courage... It is not of course unnatural that those who lost the race to power in the 1992 Election should feel bit- ter and angry towards an electorate that did not, after all, love them best. But no Alliance of Alternatives to Toryism will ever work as long as it maintains the arro- gance of imputing stupidity to those whom it has failed to woo. It is not that the elec- torate has chosen to hang on to nanny: rather that the thumb-sucking losers have chosen to blame her for preferring their more appealing sibling.' And with siblings like that, who needs enemies?
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