Indications that the new Survation phone poll may show Tory lead dropping to just 6%

I'm going out on a limb with this one because these figures aren't officially confirmed yet, but having done a bit of Kremlinology on Twitter I'm inclined to believe they're probably accurate.  They seem to have been published early by mistake and then quickly deleted.  (And I should stress that I'm not breaking an embargo, because I haven't been sent embargoed information.)

Britain-wide voting intentions (rumoured Survation phone poll results) :

Conservatives 43% (n/c)
Labour 37% (+3)
Liberal Democrats 8% (n/c)
UKIP 4% (n/c)

The apparent drop for "others" isn't necessarily a cause for concern, because there's still around 8% of the vote that the four parties listed above don't account for, which in theory leaves plenty of room for a decent SNP share.

Some people are attributing mystical significance to the Survation phone series, because it uses the same methodology as an unpublished poll late in the 2015 campaign which (unlike almost every other poll) was very close to the final result.  As that was just a single poll, though, it's unclear whether that good performance was achieved by chance (ie. random sampling variation) or because of superior methodology.  If the latter is the case, it may be significant that Survation seem to be producing results similar to YouGov and ORB, rather than similar to the more Tory-friendly pollsters ICM and ComRes.

Phone polls are rare in this campaign, but after the shock of the EU referendum we've probably moved past the point of assuming that phone polling is bound to be more accurate than online polling.  ICM have actually abandoned phone polling altogether because of the difficulty of getting a representative sample by phone.  Nevertheless, if Survation's figures are confirmed, it'll at least be reassuring to learn that phone polls don't appear to be producing better results for the Tories.