UPDATE: Looking at the rest of the YouGov/Sunday Times poll, the public think that the Conservatives are far more likely to cut spending on frontline public services by 50% to 14%. However, they also think the Conservatives are more likely to increase taxes (by 37% to 26%). The implication is that people think the Conservatives are more likely to actually cut down the deficit… but that this is not necessarily a political plus!

With Samantha Cameron about to join the campaign trail, there was also a question asked whether she or Sarah Brown would make the better Prime Ministerial consort – 29% said Sarah Brown to 25% for Samantha Cameron.

There’s a drop in Conservative support and a boost for the Liberal Democrats – the poll was conducted on Wednesday and Thursday so this is too early to be the result of coverage from the Lib Dem conference. The Conservative lead has dropped to 7 points in a similar trend to that we’ve seen from YouGov over the last week, though their overall figures are different (YouGov has Labour higher, ICM have the Lib Dems higher).

ICM also asked whether people trusted Gordon Brown or David Cameron more on various issues. Cameron was narrowly trusted more on the economy (by 3 points), education (by 7 points) and the NHS (by 2 points) (though the gap has narrowed since the same questions were asked in January).

Later tonight there should be a YouGov poll in the Sunday Times and possibly (I’ve had no information about it, but may be due this weekend) a ComRes poll.

The movement is well within the margin of error. What is actually more significant is that the Conservative lead has been below 6 points in every one of YouGov’s polls this week. For the first two weeks of their daily polling, it seemed quite evident that the lead was around about 6 points and the daily polls were just random sample variation around it. This week the lead seems to have narrowed.

UPDATE: There is also a new Angus Reid poll for Political Betting out tonight, which shows a completely different picture. There the topline figures are CON 39%(+1), LAB 26%(nc), LDEM 18%(-1). Others are presumably somewhere around 17.

Clearly there is a methodological difference here – while the levels of Conservative support are within the same ball park, Labour’s figure down in the mid 20s stands out in contrast to most other companies except for newcomers Opinium. Part of this will be down to Angus Reid’s politicial weighting, but that’s probably not enough to explain all of it. The other difference, as I mentioned earlier in the week, is on support for the minor parties. The newer online companies (Angus Reid, Opinium and Harris) are showing much higher levels of support, up in the region of 17 or so, than the more established companies like ICM, Populus, YouGov and MORI, who all have them down near 11 or 12.

We are still within the margin of error of the 6 point Tory lead that YouGov have had for about three weeks now, but the last four polls have all shown the lead below 6. It looks to me as though things may still be very gently narrowing.

Looking ahead, we today had confirmation that the Budget would be on the 24th March. Late last year I flagged it up as one of the known unknowns ahead that could potentially change the political scene (the other remaining one being the leaders’ debates) – I looked at the political impact of some recent budgets back in 2009 here

I am not aware of any recent published polls, however, in the run up to the vote on the devolution of policing powers this week two polls were released, one commissioned by the Northern Ireland Office, the other by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM). No figures for party support were officially released, but Mark Devenport the BBC’s Northern Ireland political editor has them “unofficially”.

These come with HUGE, TOWERING caveats. We don’t know if they are true, we don’t know if what the companies involved did to get them, and the record of polling in Northern Ireland really isn’t great to begin with. For what it’s worth though:

Red Circle/OFMDFM
TUV 2%
DUP 30%
UCUNF 19%
All 11%
SDLP 19%
SF 16%
Others 4%

Northern Ireland Office
TUV 1%
DUP 26%
UCUNF 16%
All 8%
SDLP 21%
SF 17%
Others 9%

I would not put too much trust in them. Sinn Fein look very low indeed, the Alliance very high. Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice is almost completely absent despite managing 13% in the European elections. However, unless someone commissions a proper poll in Northern Ireland, it is all we have.

UPDATE: I haven’t managed to track down the proper poll Ruairi mentions in the comments, but I have found another proper voting intention poll commissioned by the Belfast Telegraph. A face-to-face quota poll by Inform Communications, weighted by age, gender, community background and class (and it does at least have Sinn Fein ahead of the SDLP). NB – it’s Assembly election voting intention, not Westminster.

Inform/Belfast Telegraph (5th-9th Feb)
TUV 6%
DUP 18%
UCUNF 15%
Alliance 7%
SDLP 13%
Sinn Fein 21%
Others 6%

As ever, we should treat changes with some scepticism until confirmed by further polling (remember that 2 point lead a fortnight ago that immediately vanished in the next poll) but it’s worth noting that we have now had three YouGov polls in a row showing a lead below 6…

UPDATE: There is also a new Harris poll in the Metro. The topline figures are CON 37%(-2), LAB 29%(-1), LDEM 18%(-4). This implies a 7 point jump for “others” to 16 points.

When it comes to minor parties there is an interesting divide between the traditional phone pollsters and YouGov on one hand, and the newer online companies on the other. YouGov and the phone pollsters all have the “others” around 11% or 12%. The three new online entrants, Harris, Angus Reid and Opinium all have them around 16% or 17%.

Populus’s poll sampled Labour held Conservative targets from 50-149, so excluding the 50 Labour-v-Conservative seats with the smallest majorities. By Peter Riddell’s calculations, these seats had shares of the vote of CON 31.4%, LAB 45.3% in 2005. On that basis this poll represents a swing of about 6.7%, just short of the sort of figures the Conservatives would need for an overall majority.

Of course, we haven’t had a national Populus poll for a month so we can’t say for certain if this poll suggests a larger lead in the marginals than at a national level. For the record though, the swing this poll suggests in the marginals is the equivalent of a 10 point lead nationally, a larger lead than most polls from other companies have been showing in recent weeks.

We are still awaiting a Populus poll of marginal seats. It appears the vote shares are 38/38, but until we know which seats were polled and what swing it represents that’s pretty meaningless.

The topline figures of the poll are CON 37%(-2), LAB 30%(+1), LDEM 16%(+1), with changes from a week ago. I don’t recall a poll in the Express a week ago, so this may have been unpublished, or it may just be that the contents of the Express entirely bypass the blogosphere and no one at all noticed. Back in October Opinium said they were going to launch weekly UK voting intention polls and were running it already to collect back data, but this is the first results from it that I have noticed. One thing that immediately attracts attention is that figures of 37, 30 & 16 implies support for others at 17 points, a very high figure compared to most other companies.

All I know about Opinium at the moment is that the polls are conducted online using a panel, I’ve dropped Mark a line to get some more details. The Press Association refers to it having been carried out “using Opinium’s research panel of 1,960 adults”, which suggests a panel study re-contacting the same people, rather than different samples being drawn from a larger panel. Time, however, will tell.

UPDATE: I’ve heard back from Mark, so here is the methodology rundown for Opinium. Firstly, the fears about a panel of only 1,960 asked every week are thankfully unfounded – Opinium are drawing samples from their larger panel of 40,000 (so about the same size as Angus Reid’s).

Weighting is by gender, age, region, working status and social class – there doesn’t seem to be any political weighting, but the robustness of the samples has been tested on things like past vote and propensity to vote for the main parties, so presumably Opinium feel their samples are sufficiently politically representative to not require it.

There is a two stage voting intention question – “If there were a general election tomorrow, for which party would you vote?”, with prompting for the three main parties or “some other party” and then a second question for those who say other asking which other party people would vote for. There is no squeeze question or re-allocation of don’t knows – an aproach that is broadly similar to YouGov.

The topline voting intention figures include all those who say they would “definitely” or “probably” vote in a general election tomorrow (which sets Opinium aside from the other online pollsters, neither YouGov nor Angus Reid have a likelihood to vote filter).

For those who care about such things, their BPC membership is pending. As I mentioned yesterday, they have been quietly running voting intention polls internally for the last six months or so to build up back data, Mark has sent me over all those results and I’ll put them into the database later on.