MAKE DAVE MR POPULAR?
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.