According to a senior adviser to the Queen, talking to the Observer's columnist Pendennis, support for republicanism is no higher now than it was in the days of William IV and Victoria. "It's such a shame," he mused, "that polling doesn't have a longer history." Well, exactly. "Who do you think would make the best leader for the children of Israel: Moses? Aaron? Joshua, son of Nun? Caleb, son of Jephunneh? None of these?"
It is pretty clear that this question was being assiduously asked in the wilderness (see Numbers, chapter 14), though not of course with the rigid sampling techniques favoured by Professor Robert M Worcester. And even where there is a history, it is often hard to get at. Few of the many thousands of questions with which people with clipboards have pestered unfortunate citizens over the years can be disinterred without a disproportionate struggle. So it's welcome to find a new book called British Political Opinion 1937-2000, compiled by Robert J Wybrow and edited by Professor Anthony King, which plots what, according to Gallup, we thought at the time on a wealth of issues from the advisability of restoring Churchill to office to the case for moving straight to Prince William on the death of our present Queen.
In some ways the book is frustrating: such a wealth of figures, with so little attempt to put them in context, despite the fact that the professor is an acknowledged whizz at psephological whys and wherefores. But prepare, even without such guidance, to be surprised. Life is not always, perhaps not often, quite as we remember it. Dissatisfaction with the government's conduct of the second world war peaked not in 1940, when Chamberlain was replaced, but in March 1942. In April 1979, a month before Thatcher's triumph, the Tories led Labour as the party best equipped to deliver a fair society. In 1988, when respondents were asked which of the party leaders would make the best prime minister, one of the leaders went unmentioned by anyone.(You will have to wait to the end for the answer to that one.*)
But my favourite finding of all comes when Gallup asks voters where they would place various party leaders on a left-right scale. That 4% in the decade 1980-90 assigned Margaret Thatcher to the far left is almost beyond belief. There are few richer delights in the study of polls than the discovery of contrarians. Sometimes responses like these have the smack of mischief-making about them. An ICM poll for the Mirror in September last year found that 1% of respondents thought the battle of Britain 60 years earlier had been fought with the Romans, while 4% said the Normans. Asked who had been leading Britain in those fateful days, 2% (6%18-24s) said King Alfred, and 1% (2% of 18-24s) Margaret Thatcher. Were all of these people serious?
As you browse through ICM's polls for the Guardian through last year, other findings, less spectacularly shocking but still decidedly curious, leap out and thwack you. Here are 1% of avowed Labour supporters, asking which party they'd least like to see winning the next election, replying: Labour. Here are 1% classing nurses and teachers in the category more often reserved for journalists and estate agents: devoid of public respect. Here are 22% of Conservatives - in March, well before the autumn of discontent - saying that if Gordon Brown needs more money he should shove up the tax on petrol. Elsewhere we find 20% of Conservative respondents agreeing that the monarchy is no longer necessary.
Who are these people? Some are having a bit of fun at the clipboard's expense. Some are the kind of curmudgeons who tell the annual British Social Attitudes survey that the government is spending too much on assistance to carers. Some may be simply perverse, like the 0.4% who boast - the last BSA survey again - that if the government tried to deter use of the motor car by doubling the price of petrol they would use their cars even more. Or confused, like the people who told ICM early this year that although they did not think mobile phones a health hazard, they would not themselves, on those grounds, use a mobile phone.
But let us not disparage dissent. Some of the pollsters' contrarians are motivated by nothing worse than determination to think for themselves and not to succumb to mere fashion. What a shame, though, that not one of these people could have been found to put up a hand for the party leader who in 1988 went unmentioned by anyone. *Who was, by the way, Robert Maclennan, briefly leader of the doomed SDP. Go on, admit it: you'd forgotten him too.
• British Political Opinion 1937-2000: the Gallup Polls, published by Politico's, £30
