Ukip ‘buries’ poll that shows Farage could lose on 7 May

Nigel Farage has been accused of burying a private poll which shows that he faces potential defeat in South Thanet, the constituency he has chosen to fight in the general election.

Farage has said that he will resign as Ukip leader if he fails to win the Kent seat on 7 May – a move that could have dramatic implications for a party that many see as a one-man band.

The constituency poll, commissioned from ComRes and paid for by the wealthy Ukip supporter Arron Banks, shows Farage far from certain victory. Instead he’s neck and neck in a three-horse race.

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Not only is he currently a point behind the Tory candidate, Craig Mackinlay, according to the poll which has been leaked to the Mail on Sunday, he’s only one point ahead of the Labour candidate, Will Scobie.

As the Mail reports: “Ukip hoped the Thanet poll would echo an earlier one showing Farage heading for a famous victory, and they planned to use it to whip up more support.

“But when the result came through, Farage had a shock.” And so he ordered its suppression, the paper claims, "to avoid causing panic in Ukip ranks – and encouraging his rivals".

(It should be said that all the ComRes figures are within the normal polling margins of error. Mackinlay is on 31 per cent, Farage on 30 and Scobie on 29. Anything could happen on 7 May if these figures don’t shift between now and then.)

Ukip’s excuse for the cover-up, according to the Mail, is that the ComRes poll was “unreliable” and a “rogue poll’”. But Andrew Hawkins of ComRes said his company’s methodology was “rock solid”.

That said, the poll is clearly at odds with another Ukip private poll conducted by Survation and released with a flourish in February because it showed Farage with an 11-point lead over Labour and a 12-point lead over the Conservatives.

But the leaked ComRes poll is much closer to the three Ashcroft constituency polls conducted in May, July and November last year, all of which showed South Thanet to be a tight three-way marginal and raised questions as to whether Farage – desperate for a seat at Westminster to cement his party’s surge in popularity – had chosen the right constituency to fight.

There are legitimate reasons for differences between pollsters’ results, to do with the likelihood of the respondent turning out to vote on polling day, and other issues such as tactical voting. Each pollster weights their results differently to take account of these issues: these “house effects” are lucidly explained by Anthony Wells at UK Polling Report.

So what’s the true picture in South Thanet?

First, don’t write off Nigel Farage: party leaders usually benefit locally from national media exposure during the latter stages of an election campaign. And this is the man who on election day 2010 crawled out of a plane crash battered but alive.

Second, don’t under-estimate the Labour candidate’s chances. Not only does Labour claim to be winning the “ground war” in South Thanet with its highly organised campaign team, but it also benefits from the fact both Will Scobie’s key rivals are tarred with the Ukip brush: Farage is the party’s chief standard-bearer, while the Tory Mackinlay is a former Ukip activist.

As a result, Labour has been targeting female voters in normally Conservatives area of the constituency, asking them to “lend us your vote to stop Farage”.