Trendy

Whoever conducts The Great Opinion Poll Inquest, I think a longer look at trends helps the pollsters out.  We tended to obsess with the tracking over the six week campaign, which failed to detect any seismic changes - and led commentators to say that the politicians hadn't engaged with the electorate in any meaningful way.

But if you expand the BBC's Poll of Polls tracker to cover the five years of the last Parliament, you can see a gentle rise and decline of interest in Miliband, an emerging upwards line over two years for Cameron, the rise and plateau of UKIP and the steady, steady decline of the Libdems.