Updated 2145

CreweTV

By election voting shares – CON 48%: LAB 35%: LD 12%

A ComRes poll taken amongst voters in Crewe and Nantwich for the Independent is showing that the Tories are heading for a 13% lead. This is substantially bigger than the 8% that ICM had in their survey at the weekend for the News of the World.

The first details came from Andrew Grice’s blog .

What could be critical here is the timing of this latest poll. If the fieldwork took place over the weekend, which I assume, then it seems to suggest that things have continued to move away from Labour.

ComRes and ICM are both telephone pollsters operating quite similar methodologies although their processing of the data is different. Quite often ICM carry out the fieldwork for ComRes though I do not know whether that happened here.

A 13% Tory lead compares with the 16.8% margin that Labour had at the general election and if this was to come about would represent a swing of just under 15%. Anthony Wells’s excellent list of Tory target seats only goes up to the first 200 with the final one requiring a swing of just 10.5%. Within that top 200, at place 191, is Steve McCabb’s Birmingham Hall green. Steve is the Labour official leading their campaign in the Cheshire seat.

All this suggests that we could be in landslide territory which could have a dramatic affect on the current domestic political scene – particularly on Gordon’s future.

Mike Smithson