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John Curtice: top tipster

John Curtice has the knack when it comes to predicting election outcomes. John Crace asks what the future holds
There weren't too many smiling faces to be seen on the morning of Friday May 6. Tony Blair looked momentarily contrite as the Labour majority was cut by roughly 100 seats; Michael Howard announced his imminent departure after the big Tory revival rather fizzled out; and Charles Kennedy was trying to put a brave spin on why the Lib Dems were unable to capitalise on the obvious failures of the two main parties.

But if you looked around the back of the TV newsroom you would have found one man who was more than happy with his election result. Throughout May 5, John Curtice, professor of government at Strathclyde University, had been masterminding an exit poll - based on 3,000 interviews at 120 polling stations - for both the BBC and ITN and come 10pm, when the polls closed, both channels broadcast his predictions of a 66-seat Labour majority.

While other polling organisations in the run-up to the election were forecasting anything from a 30-seat to 100- seat majority, he wasn't going to lose too much sleep when the eventual result showed him to have been out by one.

Calling it right is some achievement: but did he call it for the right reasons? Curtice pauses for a moment. "That's another question, of course," he says cheerfully, "but I think the truthful answer is that yes, we did.

"It was a huge operation, and loads of people other than me were analysing the data. But I think there were three crucial areas where we got it right. It's impossible to know whether you have a representative sample of polling stations, so you go back to the same ones you've sampled before - making sure there have been no boundary changes - and, rather than estimating the overall levels of party support, you estimate the changes in levels of support. There tends to be less variation in the changing levels of support, so you are more likely to get it right irrespective of where you go.

"We also looked for the possibility that changes in support varied systematically from one type of seat to an other: if there had been larger movement from Labour to Conservative in marginals Labour was trying to defend, then Labour would have lost more seats overall. Our exit poll consistently picked up that the Lib Dem vote was not going up and the Labour vote was not going down in contests where the Lib Dems and Conservatives were the two main parties. So it followed that if the Labour vote was not going down much in these seats then it must be going down more elsewhere."

Like all pollsters, Curtice has been caught out - most notably back in 1992 when the exit polls at 9.55pm reported a different result to those at 9.15pm to give the Tories an expected victory, but Curtice has something of a reputation for getting it right more often than most. Back in 1996, he gave a speech at a plenary session of the Political Studies Association in which he predicted that Labour would crush the Conservatives with a majority of 170 in the following year's election. Curtice reports that this was greeted with gasps of astonishment from the audience - "everyone thought landslide victories were a relic of the past" - but he was soon vindicated.

Opinion polls are part science, part number crunching and part art. Curtice doesn't underplay the art - "at some point you have to put the data to one side and make a judgment call on how to interpret it" - but the science is what really drives his work. He became interested in politics at what he describes as "the unnaturally early age of 11" when Gaitskell died and Harold Wilson led the Labour party to victory in 1964. "I was up half the night listening to the results," he said. "For some reason, I found the whole process gripping."

Curtice grew up in Cornwall, where his mother and uncle later went on to become involved in local politics as councillors for different parties, before heading up to Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics. He transferred to Nuffield College as a postgraduate, where he studied under David Butler, the UK's foremost psephologist at that time.

"I seem to have acquired the knack of being in the right place at the right time in my career," Curtice laughs. "David had always been involved with the media and through him I was asked to become part of the television production team for the 1979 election." Curtice has never looked back. As a result of his appearance he was asked to write that year's statistical appendix to the official election survey - "a wonderful free entry to the political election literature" - and has been part of the TV coverage of every election ever since.

Writing the appendix was a gift in more ways than one, for as Curtice ploughed his way through the figures he came across something that everyone else had missed. "I realised that the British election system was no longer behaving in the way it was conventionally held to operate," he says. "There had been a decline in the number of marginal seats, so the system had lost a lot of its exaggerative power to deliver big majorities."

This finding brought him to the attention of a group of academics, including Tony Heath, the leading sociologist, and Roger Jowell, former director of the national Centre for Social Research, who were bidding to write the British Election Studies, and Curtice soon found himself an integral part of the British Social Attitudes survey. However, he freely admits it was as much his willingness to do the donkey work that no one else wanted to do as his political savvy that made him so popular with other academics in the early part of his career.

"One of the best pieces of advice David Butler ever gave me," he says, "was that if I wanted to study elections, then I needed to understand quantitative analysis." So he made it his business to learn statistics and taught himself to become computer literate at a time when most social scientists could barely operate a slide rule.

Curtice maintains he got his first main job at Liverpool University in 1983 because he was the only applicant who knew one end of a computer from the other, but he certainly arrived at the right time, as Derek Hatton's leadership of the city council made compelling viewing for a politics academic. His next - and so far final - move to Strathclyde proved equally serendipitous, as it gave him the chance to observe Scottish devolution at first-hand.

Academics who mix so freely with the media often tend to get their independence called into question, but Curtice is well aware of the dangers and works hard to maintain neutrality. He refuses to take money for speaking to any political party and insists that whatever he does say is kept in the public domain.

"I couldn't let the Labour party get away with its claims that if one in 10 Labour supporters voted Lib Dem then the Conservatives would get in," he says, "because it was manifestly untrue. It goes without saying my comments [widely reported in the media] were not well received by Millbank and I did get a number of calls from people pointing out the error of my ways, but all this just goes with the territory."

Labour might also be less than thrilled with his verdict on its recent election success. "After two terms in office this party has done worse than old Labour under Callaghan," he argues. "A 36% share of the vote is just disastrous. Labour is just fortunate the electoral system is biased in their favour; if the Tories had a 3% lead, they would still be 50 seats behind Labour."

He is adamant that it was the Tories' failure - "no one believes they can run a whelk store" - rather than Labour strengths that was the determining factor, and he is equally convinced that Blair is a dead duck as a leader. "The papers rather got it wrong over Iraq," he suggests. "The problem wasn't the war, it was Blair. Voters had lost trust in him, and there's no way back from that. MPs discovered just how unpopular he was when they went back to their constituencies, which is why there have been so many calls for his early departure."

But the real question for the man who called it right on May 5 is what happens in four years' time. "Making three fairly big assumptions - that the Labour government will not be that successful, that the Tories will make some recovery and that support for the Lib Dems will not collapse - then the most likely result is a hung parliament." He pauses, as if realising exactly what he's said. "But for God's sake don't hold me to that." Some chance.

The CV

Name: John Curtice

Age: 51

Job: professor of government, Strathclyde University; consultant, British Social Attitudes; visiting fellow, National Centre for Social Research

Publications: co-author, How Britain Votes, 1985; Understanding Political Change, 1991; On Message, 1999; co-editor, Labour's Last Chance, 1994 and annual British Social Attitudes since 1994

Likes: classical music; escaping to his Glasgow allotment

Dislikes: smoky rooms

Married: with a daughter

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