WAS NEWSNIGHT POLL SKEWED TO MAKE DAVE MR POPULAR?

AS DAVID Cameron battled it out against David Davis for the party leadership in the autumn of 2005, help came from an unlikely quarter.

American pollster Frank Luntz had been invited on to BBC’s Newsnight to test people’s reaction to clips of leadership candidates. Their response to the youthful and then little-known Cameron was off the scale — and proved a major turning point in Cameron’s favour.

‘I’ve never seen a turnabout like this!’ declared Luntz breathlessly. ‘We may have seen history being made.’ Luntz claimed the verdict of his focus group was unanimous. ‘Average voters, those who would consider voting Conservative, have spoken clearly and as one .... David Cameron was exactly what swing voters are looking for,’ he said.

Cameron’s team was ecstatic, rushing out triumphant press releases to print and broadcast media and distributing copies of Luntz’s polling to every MP.

In their haste, they overlooked copyright rules, running into trouble with BBC lawyers. They also breached parliamentary regulations by using an internal mailing system at Westminster to circulate footage, earning a rap over the knuckles from Commons authorities. Luckily, nobody found out.

The frenzy of activity paid off. Literally overnight, the young MP for Witney surged from rank outsider in the leadership contest to frontrunner.

As far as the BBC was concerned, Luntz was an impartial observer conducting an objective exercise. He did not declare any interest.

But all was not as it seemed. It has now emerged that Luntz had strong links with several members of Cameron’s campaign team, raising serious questions about the impartiality of the Newsnight piece.

He was at Oxford at the same time as both Boris Johnson and Michael Gove — two of Cameron’s earliest supporters — and knew both well.

After they graduated, Luntz took the pair to America to take part in debates. (He also knew Edward Llewellyn — Cameron’s old friend from the Conservative Research Department and his future chief of staff — who he says lived across the street from him in Oxford.)

Ironically, it would all be long

forgotten were it not for Luntz himself. In June 2012, he was invited to No. 10 to give a private presentation to staffers on ‘words that work’.

During an informal discussion afterwards, he was asked about the Newsnight poll. To the astonishment of one present, he allegedly used words to the effect that he had deliberately presented the findings to show Cameron in a positive light.

Luntz emphatically denies saying this, or any bias.

Either way, if Newsnight had been aware that Luntz was so close to members of Cameron’s campaign team, they might have thought twice about running the piece. A number of sources on Cameron’s team concede that Luntz was able to skew the results, less by sleight of hand than by putting his own gloss on the responses from participants.

This was not intrinsically dishonest — any bias may even have been subconscious on Luntz’s part. Of course, Newsnight producers, ignorant of any connection between Luntz and the Cameron camp, may have played their part in the way the film was edited and cut.

After all, exciting results made for a better story.

‘I think it’s fair to say that, in any kind of polling or research, you can mould things slightly to the way you want.

‘Frank was just so overly excited about the way he described Cameron, that it came off very good for us,’ the source admits.

One of Cameron’s coterie says: ‘ Looking back, the way Frank Luntz represented it was that it was a much more clear-cut and overwhelming vote for Cameron than actually happened.’

All that can be said for sure is that the Newsnight poll that worked such wonders for Cameron was murkier than Luntz had viewers believe.