Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of UK in a changing Europe's Brexit and Beyond podcast.

As you might have guessed, if you've got

keen ears, I'm not your usual host. My name is Paula Surridge and I'm one of the deputy directors

at UK and a change in Europe. I'm thrilled that my guest today is Dr Mark Pack, who as well as

being president of the Liberal Democrats and having been named the fifth most

influential Lib Dem in 2020, is also the author of the soon to be published, Polling Unpacked,

great name, the history uses and abuses of political opinion polls. Now, this is my first time

in the host chair for a podcast. Mark himself, though,

is a veteran hosting the Nevermind the Bar Charts podcast, which is also highly recommended

if you like a dose of British politics chats along the way. Mark, welcome. Congratulations on the

publication of the new book. I think that's your third.

Easy question to start off with. What made you want to write a book about polling?

Really, I decided to write the book because I realised there were a lot of things that I felt I didn't know enough about.

And as somebody quite interested in polling, I also took the punt that I

hoped therefore other people might also find those questions, interesting ones to answer. And a good

example of that, I guess, is from the early history of opinion polling. The traditional story is that

there were lots of straw polls or, you know,

the Reader's Digest magazine in the US getting its readers to send in cards saying who they were

going to vote for. And they were all horribly wrong and inaccurate. And then along came George Gallup,

riding to the rescue with modern scientific polling. But there's a whole other story about how

those pre-Gallop sort of late 19th, early 20th century

surveys, maybe one should call them perhaps rather than polls, how there was a lot of really

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