The Tories get their best voting poll for more than three weeks
Given what has happened in British politics over the last few weeks I find it remarkable that back in August one of the best bets that I was recommending was that LAB would get a polling lead of some sort by the end of the year. Then such a possibility seemed so remote but how things have changed. When I made that bet with Smarkets I was talking about the possibility of an outlier.
Now with the latest Kantar 3% CON finding, we cannot disregard the fact that that might be an outlier but the other way round.
Whatever everything looks a lot tighter with the two main parties closer than we have seen. There is also a CON to LD swing.
One figure that a lot of people seem to forget is that the GB voting lead that the Tories got at GE2019 was just under 12%. So this afternoon’s Kantar 3% margin represents a CON to LAB swing of just under 4.5%. A lot of seats could shift with that though admittedly a bit fewer with the new boundaries that are due go to come in.
All this sets things up nicely for the December by-elections the first of which is a week today.