So is uniform national swing (UNS) irrelevant in this election? Not at all, says the pollster Andrew Hawkins, executive chairman of ComRes. "The marginals are not going to make a 5- or 6-point difference and blow UNS out of the water . . . the difference won't be more than 2 or 3 per cent, at best."
The most recent ComRes poll shows the Tories trailing Labour in the north of England, where they need to win crucial marginal seats. It is only a matter of time, argues one bullish minister, before polls in the marginals narrow as well. So what difference is the Ashcroft funding making on the ground? One senior Labour strategist says he is astonished to see how little money the Tories seem to be spending in the marginals. "Perhaps Ashcroft is planning to spend a huge amount in the weeks ahead, but I have seen less evidence of his money than I was expecting," he says.
Nor is there evidence that Tory spending in the marginals is helping the party out-campaign Labour. In an ICM poll in January, 28 per cent of respondents in marginal seats said they had received party literature or been canvassed by the Conservatives, compared to 24 per cent who recalled having been canvassed by the local Labour Party. Labour, according to Alexander, has made 400,000 voter contacts in marginal seats across the UK since the start of 2010. That figure is double the number of such contacts in the run-up to the 2005 election, and involves the use of software that allows local activists to set up phone banks in their homes. One cannot overestimate the importance of such efforts - research for the Electoral Commission shows that "being contacted personally by a political party during the campaign increases the probability that an individual will vote". So it is perhaps not surprising, as the senior strategist confirms, that "morale is significantly higher among our marginal MPs than it was even a month ago".
