Will this help you with the new betting market?

This morning, after the slight kerfuffle over what had been said at the polling conference in London, I decided to contact the heads of all the seven main UK political polling operations to put the question to all of them that had been asked last week – what lead, if any, do you think the Conservative will have, in terms of a percentage of the GB vote, at the coming general election?

These were today’s seven responses which, it should be stressed, are the individuals’ personal opinions:

14% Andy Morris – Angus Reid
“I thought I’d managed to get out of this 14 point Tory lead”

13% Andrew Hawkins – ComRes
“I’m tempted to speculate that the general election will be cancelled in the wake of an April military coup…This is a personal prediction, not a ComRes one – Tory lead of 13% points.”

12% Andrew Cooper – Populus
” I am happy to stand by what I said then: Conservative lead of 12%..”

11% Martin Boon – ICM
“I’m happy with 11-points.”

10% Peter Kellner – YouGov
“I am boringly consensual – Con lead 10 per cent. It may or may not be the best prediction but, assuming some outliers in both directions, won’t be the worst!”

8% Nick Moon – GFK-NOP
“I haven’t seen anything to change my mind in a week, so I’ll stick at 8%

??% Ben Page – Ipsos-MORI
“On seats we have a broad church here – there is not a settled “company view”, which reflects the fact that this far from an election there is more art than science in this! So Bob Worcester is at a spread of seats between -10 short of a majority to plus 20, whereas personally I am more of the view that due to what is likely to happen in the marginals, but is not picked up in the national polls, we could see a 40 plus Tory majority. But before May 6 a lot of events dear boy events could intervene! One of us will probably be right…”

The issue coincides with the launch of a new general election betting market on the same matter that has been launched today by PaddyPower which has:

I think the last price is the value bet but because I advised the firm I’m prevented from having a flutter.

Mike Smithson