Prof John Curtice, the man who won the election: it’s wonderful to prove the world wrong

Fifty minutes after an exit poll revealed Theresa May could lose her parliamentary majority, the poll’s author, John Curtice, appeared on a balcony above the BBC’s election night studio.

Like a donnish deity surveying the journalists and politicians scrambling to make sense of the lightning bolt launched at them, Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, calmly predicted how the night could unfold. And as time went on, commentators started to concede that it was he who had won the election. By 6am on 9 June, the results almost matched Curtice’s exit poll.

Since mid-morning on election day Curtice had been cloistered with his team of academics and statisticians working on the exit poll as numbers came in from 144 sample polling stations across the country, before heading for the TV station shortly after the polls closed. He appeared on his balcony at regular intervals throughout the night, providing commentary as his predictions were proved right. This year, he says, he stopped the following lunchtime – more than 24 hours after starting work – whereas in 2015 he was still doing interviews at 9pm, with no sleep. In the gaps between broadcasts he wrote articles analysing the results for whichever publications asked.

He is, he says, employing the same skills he does as an academic: telling stories from numbers. “And I quite like the challenge of instantly getting information, trying to make sense of it, and telling people what’s going on.”

Curtice has been doing this for 38 years. He claims to have done as many election programmes as David Dimbleby. As the pound plummeted, politicians panicked, and doubt was cast by all sides on his findings, he exuded an irrepressible confidence.

“It’s wonderful, wonderful to prove the rest of the world wrong,” he says. “That makes academic work worthwhile – when you actually discover something that people don’t know. That’s what we’re meant to be doing.”

This election is “the fourth time in a row we have said things people regarded as incredible”, he says. In 2005 he predicted a majority for Labour of 66 rather than 100, in 2010 he said the Lib Dems would lose seats and in 2015 that Cameron had won (Paddy Ashdown had promised to publicly eat his hat if the poll was right).

This time, the exit poll gave the Conservatives 314 seats and Labour 266. The final figures were 318 and 262. How surprised was Curtice by the result? “Not particularly. It was within the range of possibilities.” Would he have been surprised had he been told seven weeks earlier, when the prime minister announced her snap election, what the result would be? “I refer you to the answers I gave on 18 April, when I was on air shortly after the prime minister, and I said this is not a risk-free enterprise.”

What seemed to be forgotten, he says, is that in 2015 it took a seven-point lead for Cameron to achieve a majority of 12, so any poll that put the lead at below seven percentage points was saying the government’s majority was at risk. While early polls put May’s lead much higher, it didn’t have to come down much to threaten the size of her majority. Thirty years ago he published research forecasting the likelihood of more hung parliaments.

“I do just wonder whether the people advising her actually understood the electoral system and the way it operates these days well enough,” he says. “Because I spent months with people ringing me up saying the Tories have a nine-point lead in the polls should Theresa May go for it? And I said Noo, noo. That’s too small. It might look a big number. It’s not big enough. It’s too risky. I was surprised she went for it.”

But pollsters got it wrong too. Just a day before the election, some were still predicting a Conservative percentage point lead into double figures.

Curtice says it will take time and research to answer why this happened and he will be looking at the data over the next few months. One possibility is that pollsters overcompensated in their efforts to address their tendency in recent elections to overestimate Labour and underestimate the Conservatives. He also wonders whether polling companies underestimated the turnout among young people and the fact that voting preferences show an increasing age gap – a gap that widened even during the campaign.

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Unravelling all this will be one of his tasks as president of the British Polling Council – an unpaid and once relatively quiet role enforcing standards of transparency on the polling industry, which in the past couple of years has become more that of a coroner investigating a bloodbath.

Between elections his main job is working for the National Centre for Social Research, exploring British and Scottish social attitudes and running websites on the Scottish independence and EU referendums – and their repercussions. He was about to publish analysis of what happened in the 2015 election when the new one was called.

Curtice became involved in exit polls in 1992 – “not a happy experience” (the poll predicted a hung parliament rather than the eventual slim Conservative majority) – and has honed his technique since. The secret, he says, is measuring change. He goes to the same polling stations sampled in the previous election and measures the change in party support between the two exit polls, modelling this according to likely variables – the Conservatives were likely to do better in places where Ukip had done well previously, for example, and Labour in places with more graduates – eventually producing a set of equations for all the constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales. The final poll is based on a sum of probabilities across all parties of their chances of winning.

Curtice, an only child brought up in Cornwall, became hooked on politics early. His father, a joiner, kept his political cards close to his chest, but his mother, who did market research and catalogue sales, became a Liberal councillor. She regularly debated with his uncle, a Labour supporter turned independent councillor, and grandfather, who had persuaded AL Rowse to stand as a Labour candidate in the 1930s.

Aged nine, Curtice followed the leadership contest between Harold Wilson, George Brown and Jim Callaghan after the death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963. He recalls being allowed to stay up for the general election in 1964.

The tradition of family discussion set him up well for A-levels, when he discovered that analysing, evaluating and criticising facts was much more fun than regurgitating them. This – and a talent for singing – took him to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study PPE, and then to postgraduate work at Nuffield College under David Butler, already a “telly don”.

Butler enlisted his help in crunching numbers on a rudimentary computer for the 1979 election programme, (previously, Butler had relied on a bank of students with slide rules) starting him on a long career as a TV pundit, first analysing the results behind the scenes and then on air. He now does a bit of both; a typist takes down his every election night observation and it is made available across the BBC.

So when is the next general election? “In the short run, May is there because nobody in the Tory party wants another election.” The Fixed-term Parliaments Act is still in place, he points out, and for the moment it’s in no party’s interest to abolish it since none can be sure of winning. Most likely is that the government will lose a vote of confidence. He gives it less than five years.

And Boris Johnson’s chances? “I just don’t see how you can stop him, which is one of the reasons why May may survive rather longer than we might imagine. At least Boris would be able to fight an election campaign. He may be a lousy minister, but he’d probably be willing to have a leaders’ debate every week.”

What about tuition fees? “The government will probably not increase tuition fees for the foreseeable future because I guess it’s going to need a statutory order and you’d reckon they might be in trouble. But they won’t be able to get rid of them because of the way they’ve organised their finances.”

And Brexit? “Lots of claims are made about we want a hard Brexit, soft Brexit. Actually, people are in favour of both – they are against freedom of movement and they are in favour of free trade.”

An important job of opinion polls, he argues, is to keep policymakers and politicians honest – and able to understand where the public is at. “I think a society is likely to operate more effectively if it understands itself better, he says. Without polls “all you get is a bunch of politicians saying everybody thinks that, or everybody thinks this, we’re winning votes, no, we’re winning votes. How the hell do we know who’s right?”