On the front page of my dnoc today Alan Travis begins his report on the results of a Guardian/ICM poll of Labour Party members as follows:
Two-fifths of Labour party members say Tony Blair should stand down before the next general election, according to the results of this month’s Guardian/ICM opinion poll.
In his longer report of the survey on an inside page Travis gets in early:
A clear third or more of the party remains rebellious on Iraq…
Employing powerful analytical techniques vouchsafed to me by my early education, I managed to deduce that, if these statements are indeed correct, then three-fifths of Labour Party members don’t think Blair should stand down before the next election, and a clear(ish) two-thirds of the party aren’t rebellious on Iraq. The more detailed results confirm these deductions: 39% of those polled want Blair to step down either immediately (16%) or before the next election (23%); 56% only want him to do so either after the next election (21%) or after the election after that (35%). Again, mobilizing all my inner intellectual resources for the task, I worked out that the biggest group here is the group wanting Blair to stay on longest. This is how the Guardian leader presents that:
… although only 16% think he should step down now, 23% think he should leave before the next election and only 35% want him to fight the one after next.
So it goes.