LONDON — Questions are swirling around the British polling industry — and piling up for the company implicated in a Reform UK party scandal that prompted the resignation of two senior party aides.
The scandal hinged on donations from undercover reporters posing as a wealthy American benefactor and his son that were used to pay for a real set of high-impact polls that were released without disclosing the funding source.
These polls were carried out by the influential opinion research firm JL Partners, which has become a fixture of the British polling landscape since it was founded seven years ago by James Johnson, who served as an adviser to Theresa May when she was prime minister.
Since the sting video first aired last week, former employees and clients of JL Partners have told POLITICO that the company carried out other polls where the funder was not declared — while similar lapses have occurred at other well-known British polling companies.
Rules set out by the British Polling Council, the industry watchdog, specify that all research carried out by pollsters which enters the public domain “must include reference to the… client commissioning the survey” as well as dates, methodology and sample size.
JL Partners did not respond to requests for comment on these fresh claims. The company told Channel 4 News in response to the report about their work for Reform UK last week: “Despite there being no concern about the accuracy of our work, the report did reveal weaknesses in our procedures.”
The British Polling Council said in a statement about the Channel 4 News report that it was “clear there have been breaches” of the watchdog’s rules, adding: “We are seeking further information from the BPC member concerned.”
Reform UK denies any wrongdoing in relation to the sting, which is now under investigation by the Met Police.
Tory leadership races
Johnson’s firm conducted polls on three occasions during the Tory leadership elections in 2022 and 2024 which received press coverage without disclosing who paid for them either in the media reports or in the company’s published tables.
JL Partners conducted internal research for Rishi Sunak’s 2022 bid for the leadership and Tom Tugendhat’s 2024 campaign and Johnson had personal ties to both camps, according to two people linked to the pollster and three people linked the Conservative Party, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Two of these people went further, and claimed allies of the candidates had arranged polls without it ever being disclosed. These polls produced positive findings for the candidates in question and were subsequently shared with the media, the same people said. There is no suggestion the findings were manipulated.
An ally of Sunak denied that his campaign had commissioned the poll in question. Tugendhat declined to comment.
A JL Partners poll conducted in 2022, which was picked up by the Telegraph, showed Rishi Sunak was rated most highly by Tory voters asked who would make a good prime minister, but did not mention who was behind the poll.
A person familiar with the Telegraph’s publication process said they didn’t have any record of being given any more information than what was published.
Another survey carried out by JL Partners in 2024, covered by the Daily Express, quoted Johnson as saying it was “a good poll for Suella Braverman and Tom Tugendhat” without any mention of who commissioned it. Reach PLC declined to comment on behalf of the Express.
A news item on BBC Radio 5Live in the same year concentrated on a focus group with broadly positive findings for Tugendhat. The focus group was commissioned by the BBC, but it is not known who paid for it.
Dominic Cummings, former chief of staff to Boris Johnson, questioned the BBC Radio 5Live feature at the time, posting on X: “Pollsters should make clear when they are being paid by campaigns. And a media company that cared about honesty to their audience would insist on this.”
A BBC spokesperson told POLITICO: “This focus group was commissioned by BBC Radio 5Live from JL Partners at no cost to the BBC. The BBC understood that no third party had funded or commissioned the work and the programme made clear that the focus group was not representative of wider public opinion.”
Questions for industry
POLITICO also discovered several instances of other pollsters failing to cite their clients.
JL Partners director Johnson wrote an op-ed in the Telegraph earlier this year discussing a shift in public opinion against assisted dying without mentioning the poll cited in the piece was paid for by the Christian lobbying group CARE.
Johnson, the firm’s founder, has also contributed opinion columns to POLITICO in the past, in some cases citing his polling without disclosing who paid for it.
A recent Opinium poll carried by the website Guido Fawkes which highlighted Londoners would rather have an entrepreneur than an ex-minister as mayor did not state the poll was commissioned by London mayoral hopeful Festus Akinbusoye. While this information was included in an Evening Standard write-up of the poll, it was only published belatedly by Opinium.
A spokesperson for Opinium said: “We take our responsibilities as a member of the British Polling Council seriously and are committed to meeting the requirements that apply when polling enters the public domain.”
They added they had rectified the way the tables were labeled, which they said was due to an “administrative oversight.”
In another case in January 2023, the Liberal Democrats commissioned Savanta to ask voters who was responsible for the problems the country faces. The respondents were asked to choose between three named Conservative prime ministers, the Conservative Party itself, and the COVID pandemic and the Ukraine war, with no other answers available.
The poll was private until some of its results were briefed to the Observer newspaper, which brought it under the British Polling Council’s transparency rules. Despite this, Savanta did not upload the full tables — confirming the client, sample size and details of the questions and answers — until POLITICO contacted the firm this week.
A Savanta spokesperson said the failure to upload the tables was “an oversight on our part.”
Transparency campaigners have said it is time that polling firms were held to tougher standards.
Tim Picton from the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption said: “These alarming revelations suggest that this is a long-standing issue that goes beyond just one polling company. It is vital that the British Polling Council now investigates these cases and assesses if there is a wider culture of polling companies working hand in glove with political parties while not declaring the relationship.”
