The Guardian; or is it now The Guaderon?

Where was the Guardian's pro-Cameron ICM poll actually conducted? Support for David Cameron exists only in the South East, where the Tories already hold most of the seats. They are looking at piling up majorities in places like Cameron's Witney, Ed Vaizey's Wantage and Michael Gove's Surrey Heath, of the size that Labour MPs used to get from the miners. But so what? Where are the miners now?

In the days when the Tories used to win General Elections, they did so by winning seats in Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands. They first nearly and then actually lost office by losing first many and then most of those seats, respectively in 1992 (when no one had ever heard of Tony Blair) and 1997 (when Labour's poll rating had not varied since Golden Wednesday, also long before Blair was on anybody's radar screen). Their failure to recapture office has been precisely their failure to recapture those seats. By contrast, in 2005, they took back most of their 1997 losses in the South East, to absolutely no effect.

Furthermore, opinion polls are always recalculated to factor out the 34% that consistently expresses its intention not to vote. But we are never told that the true levels of support are 26% for the Tories, 24% for Labour, and at most 16% for the Liberal Democrats (leaving aside parties even more minor than those three have managed to make themselves).

After all, that would seem to suggest that an utterly non-Blairite, non-neocon political movement (morally and intellectually serious, not to say solvent) could reasonably expect a third or more of the eligible vote for its social democracy, its social conservatism, and its patriotism in all directions. And that would never do.