What do these polls mean?

Somewhere in tomorrows Guardian will be the latest ICM poll of voting intention. The field work will have been carried out over the period of eulogies for Tony Blair which you would have thought would have given Labour a bounce. Well according to the poll it has. The question is, is it Gordon Brown's or Tony Blair's bounce? If the poll if to be believed it is Tony Blair's.

The headline figures are: Conservatives 34 (-3%) Labour 32(+2%) and the Liberal Democrats on 21% (NC)

Feeding that into Anthony Wells election calculator gives Conservatives 250 seats, Labour 308 and the Liberal Democrats 59. In other words a hung parliament.

However when people are reminded who the leaders of the party are you get Conservatives 38%, Labour 30% and the Liberal Democrats on 20%.

Again, according to Anthony Wells election calculator gives the Conservatives 304, Labour 262 and the Liberal Democrats 53.

Like all election calculators they assume a uniform swing. I suspect the swing will be anything but. I expect Labour to be piling their votes to the rafters in their traditional safe seats and seeing them drain away in anything vaguely marginal. That will produce a fairer seat distribution for us Conservatives.

For more detail see political betting here.

I will add a link to the Guardian story when it becomes available.