An email to the editor of the Daily Telegraph

I’m rather puzzled by the story that your paper has run questioning the use of weighting in YouGov’s polls.

Indeed, the piece takes such a suspicious attitude towards weighting that it puts the word in inverted commas and talks about YouGov having “admitted” that it uses weightings.

My puzzlement is quite simple.

Every single political opinion poll published by The Telegraph during your time as editor has also involved weighting.

If it’s such a questionable act, why hasn’t your newspaper shopped itself first? And will you be abandoning your own practice of publishing weighted figures?

Yours,

Mark

Note: I do think there are some reasonable questions to ask about YouGov’s methodology, such as the different picture it gives of the gender gap in politics from some other pollsters (a topic I’ve written about before). But to suggest that the concept of weighting is somehow a dodgy practice is a weird misjudgement by a newspaper that has knowledgeable people on its staff who regularly – and rightly – use weighted data and understand the need for weighting.