Election punditry is tricky when the polls are this greasy

Three things stick out from the first media week of campaigning. One is that newspaper sales – and indeed TV viewing figures – have not bounded forward amid wildly manifested enthusiasm. (Which is putting it kindly.) Another is that broadcasters have a lot of gratuitous snoozing to answer for. “Making it clear” is the saintly BBC motto running up to 7 May – but that, of course, mostly involves fairness and balance, claim and counterclaim. Here are 100 business types backing the Tories; go out and find 100 economists or 100 zero-hours toilers to say the precise reverse.

OK, the press is no better on the dark side of this balancing act. “Miliband flops”, crows the Telegraph. “Miliband riding high”, replies the Mirror. But that brings us to the heart of the problem: the curse of the petrified pollster.

Time and again, polls become the story that other stories bounce off. But this time, they’re absolutely no help

Big phone polls come in around £4,000 a time, and there are a lot of them about. But they can go rogue, produce freak results beyond easy explanation: and they always carry a margin of error – perhaps 2.5% on a big sample size, rather more on smaller sample. The virtue of (cheaper) online polling versus phone calling is a constant controversy – and different pollsters have different methodologies anyway. (Does your sample on a debate cover only those who watched it from choice, with a weighting that doesn’t reflect the national situation, or do you weight first and ask questions later?)

Meanwhile, the national polls have barely moved for months. They rumble on with Tories and Labour virtually tied in the lower 30% range. Sometimes there’s a jump: 4% on one poll after Miliband’s supposed victory in the first debate. But the next poll after that showed Cameron jumping 4%. Much dancing on the spot. As Andrew Cooper, founder director of Populus, wrote in the Guardian last week: “The truth is that, apart from the tiny (and profoundly unrepresentative) cross-section of the electorate who are partisan activists and political true-believers, nobody cares.”

And there’s an even more uncomfortable truth beyond such stasis. For, time and again, the polls shape the whole narrative of the contest. They become the story that other stories bounce off. They help define winners and losers far in advance. But this time, they’re absolutely no help. There is no narrative, apart from a cluster of little leaders (including one from a party with one MP and another who heads the fourth party in Wales).

You can concoct a theme, naturally. “Enter the Outsiders”, booms a main Times headline. Sage BBC correspondents conclude we live in an irredeemably multi-party situation (because that’s what the polls tell us, though actually rather less emphatically than in 2010).

Normally the lust of journalists for something beyond fairness or balance would be kicking in by now. We love a good tale: we hanker for tight, exciting contests. We’d grow hugely enthusiastic if the polls shifted five or so points and hinted at a pulsating result. But no dice. Think Cameron on 22%, Miliband on 21.5%, Farage on 21% and Sturgeon on 19% when you roll all the four results from Thursday into a single sample. The pollsters aren’t telling us what to do or what to say. Perhaps we may even have to think of something original for ourselves?

■ It’s good that Katherine Faulkner, Paul Bentley and Lucy Osborne (aka the Daily Mail Investigations Unit) have just had a storming week exposing dodgy data practices. It’s good the Lib Dems are coming up with media reforms, including an end to covert political appointees running broadcasting. It’s good the Mail still thinks Nick Clegg “has hardly a true liberal bone in his body” and that his “reform” package is nicked from the Guardian, “with its almost psychotic hatred of the commercially viable free press”. And it’s very good indeed that Paul Dacre, the Mail’s editor-in-chief, grows no less choleric as his 67th birthday grows closer. For true press freedom includes the right to rage on cue whenever psychotic hatreds surface. In short, to keep on Doing a Dacre. Hell, yes…

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