Huge SNP lead for Westminster reported in jaw-dropping YouGov poll

Hot on the heels of the Ipsos-Mori bombshell comes this full-scale Scottish poll from YouGov.  The figures are bang up to date, with fieldwork that ran from Monday until today (meaning that unlike the Ipsos-Mori poll it took place entirely after Johann Lamont blew the whistle on London Labour, and also after it became clear that Murphy was the most likely replacement).

Scottish voting intentions for the May 2015 UK general election :

SNP 43%
Labour 27%
Conservatives 15%
Liberal Democrats 4%

Obviously these numbers are incomplete, with 11% of voters unaccounted for.  It's likely that UKIP and the Greens between them have 10% or so, which makes it impossible that the Lib Dems are in fourth place. Presumably we'll find out whether it's fifth or sixth in the morning.

Intuitively this poll looks a lot more plausible than Ipsos-Mori, but then again how often has intuition led us astray?  If nothing else, the results are much more in line with what Scottish subsamples of GB-wide polls have been reporting, although in a sense that's a circular argument because a disproportionate number of those subsamples come from YouGov anyway.  There have been a small number of subsamples that support the story told by Ipsos-Mori (for example from Ashcroft and Survation), so we shouldn't dismiss that poll out of hand.  One thing that the two polls agree on is that the Tories are doing a bit worse than we thought - obviously that's a much more pronounced finding with Ipsos-Mori, but even the 15% figure from YouGov is on the low side, and would see the party down on the last election.  There has been a perception that the Scottish Tories were enjoying a mini-renaissance (defined as going slightly forwards when the UK party is going backwards), but it now looks like the referendum may have put a stop to that - in spite of the echo chamber effect of unionist journalists enthusiastically agreeing with each other about how many "plaudits" Ruth Davidson received during the campaign.

The SNP have released supplementary findings from the YouGov poll on trust in individual politicians.  The results don't entirely make sense in relation to the question quoted, so I think the percentages given must be the combined total of respondents who say they trust each politician either "a little" or "a lot" (that's the usual YouGov formulation).  They tell a very familiar tale, with First Minister-in-waiting Nicola Sturgeon proving to be Scotland's most trusted politician by a country mile.  Perhaps most pertinently, she's trusted by exactly twice as many respondents as Jim Murphy.  So there may be differing opinions over whether Murphy deserves his occasional billing as a "heavyweight", but there can't be much doubt that the public see him as a considerably smaller fish than Sturgeon (which I suspect may come as a shock to some metropolitan commentators who still struggle to take Sturgeon seriously because she has never served at Westminster).

OK, there's a dreadful pun there about "smaller fish than Sturgeon" which I genuinely didn't notice until after I wrote it.  Moving swiftly on...

Your cut-out-and-keep Anas Sarwar translator

What Anas Sarwar meant on Saturday when he said that it was important not to close down the option of standing as leader -

WANT IT BUT NEED SUPPORT
WANT IT BUT NEED SUPPORT
WANT IT BUT NEED SUPPORT

What Anas Sarwar meant on Monday when he said he was unwilling to stand as leader because he was so mindful of the trust that members had placed in him by electing him as deputy leader -

GOT TO KEEP WHAT I HAVE
GOT TO KEEP WHAT I HAVE
GOT TO KEEP WHAT I HAVE
PLEASE GOD AT LEAST LET ME KEEP WHAT I HAVE

What Anas Sarwar meant tonight when he said he was resigning as deputy leader because he felt strongly that it's terribly important to allow the focus to return to Holyrood -

LEANED ON
LEANED ON
LEANED ON
CONSOLATION PRIZE FOR ANAS INCOMING

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I'll wait until tomorrow to update the Poll of Polls, because until I see the YouGov datasets I would only be able to calculate the numbers for four of the six parties anyway.