CON 40% (40)
LAB 30% (28)
LD 17% (18)
OTHERS 13% (14)

And the Lib Dems slip a point

The final poll of 2009, the December YouGov survey for the Telegraph, is in the paper the morning and shows margin of error changes for Labour and the Lib Dems. The Tories stay doggedly on 40%.

Labour will be pleased though to have closed the gap a bit. It’s the LAB-LD interaction that seems to be key with the firm. When the Lib Dems move up then Labour moves down and vice versa.

Fieldwork took place on Tuesday and Wednesday and the sample, at 1848, was a bit smaller than the standard 2000. It’s quite unusual to poll between Christmas and the New Year though I doubt whether that had anything more than a marginal impact.

In the final YouGov poll of 2008 it was C42-L35-LD14. The Labour share then was higher than in any 2009 survey from the firm.

The fieldwork for the 2008 December poll, though, took place before Christmas.

Rosa Prince’s Telegraph report only gives sketchy details of the other findings and does not include the outcome of the key question that is always asked – the forced choice of whether voters prefer a Cameron-led Tory government or a Brown-led Labour one.

We’ll have to wait for the data to come out for that and that won’t be until Monday.

UPDATE: We do now have the full dataset here. The forced choice is down from 47-35 to 46-35. The “who would make the best PM” is unchanged from November at DC34:GB22:NC10.

Mike Smithson