The polling debacle – and the wisdom of Walt Whitman

I was at the IEA/Taxpayers’ Alliance post-election conference yesterday, listening to Lord Ashcroft giving facts and figures about why voters chose the Tories. Given how wrong all of the pollsters were, I did find myself wondering whether it was worth listening to this. A Tory majority government has just been elected, confounding every single bookmaker and pollster in the land.

As Ashcroft was telling us that X per cent of Tories believed in Y sentiment, I thought: statistically, what percentage of these statistics are pure bollocks? How many of the polls I’ve been reporting for the last few weeks and months have been pure bollocks?

So I gave up listening to Ashcroft’s conclusions and thought, instead, of a Walt Whitman poem which rather sums it all up:-

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.