Crosby urges ban on UK election polls

THE Australian mastermind behind the Conservative victory in this month's British general election has delivered a stinging rebuke to commentators who failed to see the result coming and urged a ban on polls in the final stages of campaigns.
LYNTON Crosby says wealthy Westminster-based pundits who only come into contact with ordinary people when they "picked up their dry cleaning" had been "talking to themselves".
The so-called Wizard of Oz warned that polls - which consistently showed the main parties deadlocked up to May 7 - could "influence" voters and suggested they should not be made public during the last few weeks. Mr Crosby, who oversaw both of Boris Johnson's mayoral election successes as well four wins back home for John Howard, gave his first assessment of the contest in an interview with British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. "It wasn't just Ed Miliband's Labour party that revealed itself as out of touch and remote from the people who are the backbone of Britain," he said. "It was a failure from the Westminster-centric Eddie the Expert and Clarrie the Commentator who were tested and found wanting. "It was a judgment day for them, as it was for Ed Miliband, and they lost." Mr Crosby also lashed out at some Conservative-supporting figures who were critical of the party's approach. "The problem with political commentary and punditry in this country is that it's conducted by a bunch of people most of whom live inside the M25 (motorway around London) who could never live on the Stg26,000 ($A50,475) that is the average annual earnings of people in this country," he said. "Most went to Oxbridge, talk only to themselves and last time they met a punter was when they picked up their dry cleaning." Mr Crosby said he is always clear that "politics is not entertainment". Mr Crosby said although he always felt the Tories were on course, the "wall of noise" from Westminster observers did make him have doubts. "It would be dishonest to say that you don't constantly question things. Because there was a wall of noise coming at us a lot of the time." However, he insisted that "at no stage" had David Cameron or Chancellor George Osborne questioned the strategy. "They were rock solid because it was soundly based. It was logical, it built on our strengths of economic competence and strong leadership, and so we stuck to it," Mr Crosby said. "The trouble now is that polls have become part of the political process, so they're not an independent measurement that says this is what's going on - they actually influence what's going on. "And I think that's quite dangerous. I would subscribe to the view there should be a stay on publishing polls publicly for two or three weeks before an election." Mr Crosby said that if he was a marketing director or a politician, "I would rarely rely on online polling alone". "I mean the public polls are a bit like going to a doctor who's reporting your temperature each day and tells you it's 38, then it's 40, then it's 39, then it's 41. They don't tell you what's actually going on, what's causing the temperature changes, yet people, they just report the temperature. What you want is diagnosis that tells you what's going on and why, and that's what they don't do."