Yougov pro-corbyn poll was ‘pulled on order of Zahawi’

YOUGOV has been accused of suppressing 2017 polling which favoured the Labour Party following alleged pressure from Nadhim Zahawi.

The firm has denied pulling the election poll because it was pro-jeremy Corbyn, but said it was because its sample of voters was “skewed”.

Chris Curtis, a former Yougov employee who is now head of political polling at Opinium, claimed that it had been pulled because it was “too positive” about Labour.

The survey allegedly showed that Mr Corbyn had won a debate in Cambridge “by a country mile”, even among one in four Conservative voters.

“Despite having written the story and designed the charts, we were banned from releasing the story because it was too positive about Labour,” Mr Curtis claimed yesterday.

He also alleged that the methodology behind the final poll released by the company before polling day had been tweaked and increased the Conservative lead, despite protests from staff.

“This was done after pressure from high-ups (and despite protests from those of us who thought it wasn’t OK)”, he wrote on Twitter. Mr Curtis also pointed to pressure the company had received throughout the general election campaign over its modelling which showed Labour was closing the gap on Theresa May’s Conservatives.

Mr Zahawi, the Education Secretary, co-founded Yougov in 2000 and was the company’s chief executive from 2005 until he stood for election as a Conservative MP in 2010. In 2017 he was a backbench MP who served on the foreign affairs committee.

A section from the book Fall Out by Tim Shipman recalled that Mr Zahawi telephoned Stephan Shakespeare, Yougov’s chief executive, saying about its polling: “I’m going to spare you the agony: I’m going to call for your resignation when you’re wrong.”

Mr Zahawi on Tuesday claimed that it was a “joke between two good friends”. “At no point since leaving Yougov in 2010 have I had any influence on the company. Suggesting otherwise is untrue,” he said.

Yougov later released a statement denying the claims by Mr Curtis.

“Chris Curtis’s allegation that we suppressed a poll because the results were ‘too positive about Labour’ is incorrect,” it said.

“When reviewed by others in the Yougov political team, it was clear that the sample of people who watched the debate significantly overrepresented Labour voters from the previous election.”