London - The Conservative party's unexpected triumph in Britain's general election delivers a hefty blow not only to the routed Labour party, but also to the pollsters who predicted a dead heat.
"The pollsters need to go off and interrogate themselves and poll each other to find who has been telling porkies to whom," concluded Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson.
"It's extraordinary that 11 polls on the eve of the election should get it so wrong."
For months, the main survey-takers had the two parties neck-and-neck, flatlining at around 35 percent each.
Only one day before the elections, YouGov, ICM and Survation called it a tie and three other polls published by TNS, Opinium and ComRes gave the Conservatives the narrowest of leads.
Panelbase gave the Tories a two-point lead while all the newspapers wrote that a hung parliament was a certainty.
But when the first exit polls emerged as stations closed on Thursday at 2200 GMT, the shock was total, giving the Conservatives 27 seats more than the most optimistic of pre-vote polls and 77 more than Labour.
Those on the receiving end at first refused to believe the survey, recalling the memory of 1992 when the exit polls erroneously predicted a Labour victory.
If anything, the exit polls underestimated the scale of the Tory gains and Labour and Lib Dem defeats.
AFP
