People are still being weird about electoral impact of VAT on school fees.

27% of adults have a dependent child at or below school age (obviously those <4 aren't at school, but reasonable to assume those who may send a child to school in the near future would be impacted)🧵 Looking at the school census, once you exclude (based on ISC data) children of non-British overseas parents sending their kids to board here, 6.2% of children are educated at a private school.

Over the next few days there will be lots and lots of polling about potential Conservative leaders. A few things to note when you are looking at them. 🧵 First - most of the people in the running are little known to the public. It's very easy to overstate how much knowledge the public have about most senior politicians - people know about the leaders, usually the Chancellor, and *very few others*.

A few quick comments on that Hartlepool poll. You may recall that last time the past vote was very odd - despite Brexit party getting 25% in 2019, Survation could barely find any former BP voters.

That is NOT the case this time - the sample looks fine on that front. (I'm guessing that means Damian did what he suggested he might, and prompted on the recall Q)

New Ipsos MORI poll shows only a 3 point Tory lead. "Tories down five!"

However, one should really look at the fieldwork dates before getting too excited standard.co.uk/news/uk/conser… It was conducted between the 16th-22nd, so not the weekend just gone, the weekend *before* that.

So firstly, discard any idea that it's anything to do with Boris vs Dom, the bedroom stuff and so on. Not unless respondents had time machines.

I mentioned this voodoo poll last week when it was being touted about social media. It looks like the Mail on Sunday was the only paper to fall for it. Well done to all those other newspapers who did not. It's tosh of course. I'll explain why below (1/20) I should add that the poll won't "send shockwaves through Downing Street", as people working in Downing Street will know the difference between a properly conducted poll and a self-selecting propaganda exercise. I do wish journalists did (2/20)

This story in the Times surprised me - a claim that support for nationalising water had fallen to 27%
thetimes.co.uk/article/suppor… Nationalisation tends to be fairly popular. A genuine drop from 83% to 27% would be very surprising indeed so, it's fair to say I was a tad suspicious.

A longish thread about trying to explain the differences in party support - primarily Labour - in the polls. It is often very difficult to get to the bottom of the differences between polls. There is rarely one big, easy simple answer, it's normally a bit of lots of little, different to explain things. Hence stupid & simple explanations prosper.

Rule 1 in interpreting public opinion should be too look at the polling in the round. Public opinion can be nuanced and complicated and taking one single poll finding that appears to back up your preconceptions and ignoring the wider picture can be deeply misleading (1/...) So, given there's been some of that sort of rubbish written about polling on No Deal today here's a quick thread summarising what YouGov's recent polls on No Deal have actually said - giving both sides of the story

The Mirror, the i and lots of local papers are today all running stories about their "big Brexit survey" which purports to show a majority of people want to remain in the single market. (1/...) It claims relevance due to the unusual large sample size - 200,000+. As you'll hopefully know, a big sample size alone does not make a poll accurate or meaningful. What determines whether a poll is worth paying attention to or not is whether it is *representative* of the public