I do not believe last week’s Spectator poll. It’s not what people think

Crikey, this really will have to be another voice. Has The Spectator taken leave of its senses? I could hardly bring myself to take last week’s edition out of its see-through plastic wrapping when, pictured on the cover, I saw a huge cartoon bulldog being walked on by a Muslim terrorist, and beside it four bald statements in big blue capital letters with a scarlet tick placed against each:

• THIS IS WAR
• WE ARE LOSING
• WE NEED TOUGHER POLICIES
• WE WILL BE ATTACKED

and, underneath, ‘The view of the British: exclusive poll’.

To my certain knowledge this is not the view of the British. I understand my countrymen well enough, and they are neither as hawkish as some at The Spectator would like them to be, nor as dovish as I could wish. So far as the view of the British on terrorism can be summarised at all (I thought) that view is doubtful, nervous, and a little sceptical of the certainties and enthusiasms of either side. It followed that those stentorian cover lines must prove a crude distortion of the findings of any self-respecting poll. Anyone on a bus expressing himself in such terms would find fellow-passengers edging away from an obvious nutter. I hardly wanted to read on.

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I forced myself. First I read the poll itself. It was immediately apparent that questions had been devised in order to encourage the answers The Spectator wanted to hear; and secondly that, even then, those polled had proved reluctant to give them.

The omission from the detailed table of any figures for the often stubbornly large chunks of ‘don’t knows’ rather gave the game away. Let me give one pregnant little example. Nineteen per cent of respondents had felt unable to choose (as the question tried to force them to) between either the statement ‘The West is in a global war against Islamic terrorists who threaten our way of life’ or the statement ‘Islamic terrorism is a regional problem that poses no real threat to the West’.