A small but very noisy section of the British news media seems to have come close to losing its collective sanity. The election campaign is maybe not quite what the people concerned would have wanted: the Tories are locked into an ever-deepening crisis, now crystallised by its gambling scandal, Labour is capably holding itself together, and the limited fireworks let off by Reform UK do not threaten the election’s seemingly inevitable result. So, for want of any other excitement, they have turned to another source of fun: opinion polls.

Has there ever been a campaign so dominated by them? For seven or eight years now, the most powerful polling companies have been developing so-called – and yes, I had to look this up – multilevel regression with poststratification (or MRP) surveys, which contact tens of thousands of voters, calculate results based on a range of granular demographic details, and result in findings that can be sifted constituency by constituency. The fact that YouGov used this method to unexpectedly predict 2017’s hung parliament has given it an air of quasi-scientific magic; now, the publication of one such poll after another is greeted in some quarters with a huge level of expectation.

The result is postmodern news that a certain kind of 20th-century social theorist would have loved. The Conservatives, the Telegraph screamed last week, are on track to “slump to just 53 seats”. The Labour party, it said, was predicted to win a mind-boggling 516. Here, it seemed, was full-blown Starmergeddon, and the advent of a one-party state. But no one had voted and nothing had actually happened. Nor, by definition, could anyone be certain that the predictions were in any way accurate. “‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning,”........

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