The opinion polls: confidence restored?

The 1997 parliamentary elections were viewed as a supreme test of the reliability of UK political polling, because all the country's major polling organizations had erred significantly in their 1992 electoral forecasts. These 1992 mistakes seriously damaged the pollsters' reputation and encouraged all to adopt substantial changes in their polling methods during the years prior to the 1997 election. The pollsters' final forecasts during the 1997 campaign, while much more accurate than those of 1992, were still unreliable enough to have been grossly misleading in a less lopsided election.