The opinion polls: what can they mean?

Overnight poll results suggest the Tory lead is back to five or six points. Enough for a clear majority – but not enough to kill off New Labour.

The jury remains out as to whether Gordon Brown will tell anyone when the election will be – or simply mention it on the day just after the polling booths close. But in this, the most important election for thirty years at least, the jury is out on everything. So allow me to have a crack at clarifying a few things.

Without going over old ground as to why I think this, the Tory marginal lead is enough to ensure that, short of those disastrous pre-weekend polls, they can expect a reasonable majority of 50-60 seats. The new polls probably represent a small bounce for Cameron among women. Some of the undecideds, however, are going to change their minds another half-dozen times before they finally decide to stay at home to watch the new Simon Cowell game-show Britain’s Got Chlamydia instead.

My own instinct is that after Morgan’s loving-up of Brown on ITV, a lot of former abstainers told a few researchers that they were going to vote Labour. This narrowed the lead rather than causing defections from the Tories. Now the Sun readers have lost interest again, I’d bet that Labour will struggle to dent the Conservative lead again: but that rash prediction is contingent on one thing.

The One Thing required for a Tory small-majority win (the best of six or seven fearfully awful possibilities) is for David Cameron to tell everyone with half a brain what they’ve known for months: the recovery was a mirage, the debt is a mess, and the Government is mad in a particularly dangerous way.

He and those around him need to say “Here’s the truth, here’s the medicine, there’s no alternative to taking a hit, the Government is lying, and Lord Mandelson is the nastiest little degenerate since Caligula”. Then hold their nerve as the truth gradually dawns in the shape of Greece getting worse, the EU squabbling, the credit agencies knocking us down, unemployment getting worse, the April output figures being truly awful, the IMF measuring the UK up for a coffin, and Mervyn King wanting to resume QE.

As it always has been, this election is Cameron’s to lose. A change of style to straight talking will see him home and dry.