Impartial opinion

As Britain approaches a general election in early 2010, thoughts turn to opinion polls. Prominent market research organisation YouGov was founded by Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim Zahawi. Shakespeare, now their Chief Innovation Officer, also owns the ConservativeHome website (formerly 18 Doughty Street), was Conservative parliamentary candidate for Colchester in the 1997 general election, and worked as Jeffrey Archer's spokesman in the late 1990s. Nadhim Zahawi, the CEO, was a Conservative councillor in Wandsworth, a Conservative parliamentary candidate, and campaign manager for Archer's bid to be mayor of London.

YouGov is not the only polling organisation with political connections. ICM chairman Nick Sparrow was private pollster to the Conservative Party Central Office from 1995 to 2004. Ipsos Mori life president Robert Worcester was knighted by Tony Blair in 2004. This does not mean that opinion poll results of any of these organisations are biased, and it doesn't look like being a hard election to call, but it will be interesting to track differences between pollsters as the election approaches.

EDIT: In April 2010, YouGov were caught out doing a biased poll on one of the election leaders' debate, in which they timed the survey so people would have to give their opinion having watched David Cameron but not Nick Clegg. This was seen as part of a wider conspiracy by the Tories and right-wing media against Clegg (see e.g. Guardian; Iain Dale).