Election polling ought to be straightforward. You simply ask people which issues determine how they intend to vote and then which party is best on those issues. Don't you?
If only life were that simple. The problem is that too often voters tell pollsters that they place more emphasis than they really do on the types of issues they feel they should be prioritising, instead of voting simply for their pocket.
The issues we need to be especially wary of are education, the NHS and crime. Don't misunderstand me: there is no question that these issues are important as drivers of voting intention, it's just that to measure their relative salience with any degree of accuracy is extremely difficult. There are, however, some useful pointers.
Labour lost its poll advantage on the NHS over the Conservatives in 2008, coinciding with Gordon Brown's descent into psephological hell. By June 2009, more people believed the Conservatives would be better than Labour at running the NHS, and by August of that year the Conservatives began to be seen as safer than Labour as custodians of the NHS's future.
Of course, delivery in government throws up some entirely different challenges from those of electioneering and the public want to have their cake and eat it. Prior to the election, eight in ten of the public wanted real-term increases in NHS spending compared with more than six in ten Conservative MPs who told us that they would oppose such a move.
Freezing the overall Department of Health budget would therefore seem like a pragmatic and sensible compromise between an unrealistically expectant public who want more government-funded health services and cut-hungry Tory MPs who think the NHS is inefficiently managed.
The centrepiece of Andrew Lansley's white paper is the replacement of primary care trusts, which cost more than £1bn a year, with GP consortia. The intention is that these will be the principal purchasers of NHS services for their patients, thereby creating a market that will encourage savings.
The plan has, unsurprisingly, come in for much flak. In a loud reminder that the British Medical Association is a trade union and not a professional body, the BMA's chairman of council Dr Hamish Meldrum said in response to the changes that a market-led approach would create "waste, bureaucracy and inefficiency".
Whether or not the BMA's initial opposition is anything other than a negotiating oposition remains to be seen, but on this issue the Association does indeed speak for GPs themselves who are unenthusiastic and concerned about the ability of the system to deliver patient improvements.
GPs are unconvinced that patients will notice an improvement as a result of GP-led commissioning. In the government's favour is that a third of GPs don't offer an opinion either way. More concerning to the health secretary will be that almost six in ten GPs say they are personally not willing to take on the extra responsibility of planning and buying healthcare for their local community.
Moreover, when we dig into the detail, the 25 per cent who are willing comprises 31 per cent of men but just 16 per cent of women. It would not be unreasonable to conclude that the introduction of GP-led commissioning may lead to greater gender disparities in both income and practice management.
Also serious and significant an obstacle to implementing the reforms is the widespread view among doctors that they are actually ill-prepared to make commissioning decisions across some of the key services.
The response to the changes has been mixed and cautious across the board. Also difficult to manage will be the resulting local variations in treatment provision and managing the media's response to an exacerbation of the ‘postcode lottery' which will inevitably result from greater local control over delivery.
The public does not understand why health services should vary across the country despite some very obvious demographic contrasts between the likes of Barking and Bournemouth. One person's postcode lottery is another's efficient targeting of resources.
My own suspicion is that in time we may conclude that Andrew Lansley has been too timid. In his diaries, Alastair Campbell suggested that Tony Blair felt he had wasted some of his early political capital by not being radical enough.
As we emerge from the worst economic crisis in living memory, the NHS is still the third largest employer in the world after the Red Army and Indian Railways. If this is not the moment to think the unthinkable about theNHS, when on earth will it be?
Andrew Hawkins is chairman of ComRes
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