Those hoping one of Westminster’s most entertaining ongoing feuds would cool after the election will be disappointed. As the dust settled on David Cameron’s majority, his 2010 confident and in-house polling guru Lord Ashcroft let rip in the New Statesman at the Tories’ victorious 2015 election strategist Lynton Crosby:
‘By and large, on balance, we can all agree that it has not been a great election for the pollsters. But there is (or so we read) one notable exception. The private polls commissioned from the Tory bunker by the campaign chief Lynton Crosby and the US guru Jim Messina got the result absolutely right, at least according to, well, Lynton Crosby and Jim Messina. If they say so, I’m sure it must be true. But why leave any room for scepticism? Come on, chaps: now it’s all over, show us the numbers so we can all see how you did it. (Perhaps I shouldn’t hold my breath.
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