A polite round of applause for The Guardian for its polling coverage

A regular absurdity of political opinion poll coverage in the UK is the way that media outlets often pretend that polls commissioned by other organisations do not exist.

If a polling company carries out, for example, two opinion polls in identical ways for two different newspapers, then the newspaper that publishes the second poll almost invariably ignores the first poll when publishing vote share changes, and instead bases them on the previous poll published in its own pages – even though that previous poll is older than the one published by its rival.

It’s as if at a general election someone reported the change in seats compared with not the last general election, but with the one before – just because they happened not to have covered the last one.

A round of applause then for Julian Glover and The Guardian, who left all this behind when reporting the latest ICM poll and instead make reference not just to the previous Guardian/ICM poll but also to the most recent ICM poll, which happened to appear in a different publication.

Now, to get a standing ovation someone would have to admit that a poll they’ve just published is a rogue poll which falls outside the normal margin of error for sampling (as you would expect around 1 in 20 to be – i.e. one about every other month in the UK as typically there are around 10 different polls with national voting intention figures published each month).