How would you feel if I told you that an early general election was within the gift of a few thousand people, who are working away for less than £3/hour?

Disbelieving, I’d imagine. Things like general elections are decided upon in the corridors of power, in the smoky back-rooms, over glasses of very fine brandy, not by those working for sweat-shop wages. Take a step back. Why aren’t those in power clamouring to get the plebs to a plebiscite? You don’t need a degree in political science to know that they’re worried, not unreasonably, that they’re going to get their arses kicked.

Take another step back. Why do they think they’re going to be thrashed like a ginger step-child? Once again, it doesn’t take the brains of Sir Professor Curtice to know it’s because that’s what the polls are telling them (and, one suspects, having burned through the spectrum of prime ministers from knows what to do / can’t get it done, on to doesn’t care what’s done / can’t be arsed to do it, then not a clue what to do / does it anyway, before landing on doesn’t know what to do / scraps plan to do anything and moves on to a new plan for something they also don’t know how to do, they must realise by now that they deserve it).

OK, one final step back. Where do they come from? The polls, not the incompetent prime ministers.

In the olden days they used to come from people standing around in places with a high footfall, clutching a clipboard, and desperately trying to get anybody passing to give up 5 minutes of their time. Then it moved to waiting until people were in the bath, and telephoning them at home, to ask for their valuable opinion. The problem with both these methods is that they take ages. Street interviewers are lucky if they can get 30 interviews in an 8-hour shift, telephone interviewing is roughly the same (but you don’t get wet and have less chance of being mugged). If you want to ask the voting intention of 1,000 people then you’re looking at forking out a lot of money.

Fortunately, with the rise in popularity of the Internet, some bright spark noticed that it was filled with people who wanted to give their opinion, all of them doing it for free, and most at volume. What if there was a way to formalise that arrangement, and pay them a small amount to give their opinion in the form of some sort of questionnaire? The panel company was born.

These days, if you want to know what, say, 500 people think of your toothpaste advert, you don’t waste time hanging around street corners, you just rock up to one of these panel companies and say, “Give me a 500 nationally representative sample, please.” They then send your on-line survey out to however many people it takes to get 500 of them to complete it, and a day later, for a couple of hundred quid, you’ve learned what people willing to answer your questions for 20p think of your brand.

Polling works in exactly the same way. It’s the same people who agreed that “Crestgate gives me mouth-confidence,” who tell you who’s going to win the next election. When you see people querying polling results by saying, “I’ve never been asked, and neither has anyone I know,” that’s because they haven’t joined a panel and frittered away their wanking time deciding whether “Whitening” or “Gum protection” is their #1 priority.

These panel companies like to boast about how many hundreds of thousands of people they have signed up and, sure, hundreds of thousands do sign up. Then the new sign-ups get too few survey invitations, or too many, or they never work out how to stop them going to their spam folder, or they find the rewards too small, or the questionnaires too boring, or they make a friend… whatever. The point is that there’s a core of committed, engaged panellists, and they likely belong to multiple panels, so there’s probably only a few thousand individuals. A tiny number.

And they’re the ones giving Rishi Sunak a squeaky bum.

But they don’t have to. It’s not like they’re under oath to tell the truth when they fill in their polling surveys. If they started lying then the polls would move. The only thing stopping these people giving the Conservatives a 20, 30, even 40 point lead – and thereby tricking them into thinking it’s safe to go to the polls – is their self-respect. AND THEY’RE RATING TOOTHPASTE FOR COPPERS!

I urge these panellists, and I’d like you to join me in this, to abandon whatever principle is driving them to honesty. If you don’t want a Conservative government, all you have to do is say that you’re desperate to vote for one. Claim, however unlikely, that Rishi Sunak would make the best Prime Minister. Rate scrapping inheritance tax, making electric cars illegal, and ritually murdering foxes as your highest priority issues. I implore you, lie like your life depended on it.

Come on, there’s 20p in it for you, and we promise we’ll stop asking about the fucking toothpaste.