Gordon Brown’s personal pollster, Deborah Mattinson, advises Northern Rock on corporate responsibility programmes. Presumably it was she who advised giving circa half-a-million quid to New Labour’s IPPR think-tank. How many more of Gordon’s circle have their hand in the Northern Rock till?

According to the front page of the Guardian Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and the Green Alliance are claiming that the government is using Deborah Mattinson’s Opinion Leader Research to distort the evidence and get the required result on nuclear power from bogus public consultations.

Duh! Of course – that is why Gordon hires and re-hires his personal pollster’s firm to the tune of £3 million. She tells him what he wants to hear.

Greenpeace says that they along “with other NGOs, trade unions, renewable energy companies and representatives of the nuclear industry met with OLR and the government in July to discuss this stakeholder briefing pack. This document was full of pro-nuclear opinion masquerading as fact … This document is fundamentally flawed and cannot form the basis for a full public consultation.” So it is not just Guido who thinks OLR’s work is another form of push-polling.

Organising “Citizen’s Juries” has made Gordon’s pollster, Deborah Mattinson, a lot of money over the years. Amazingly they have now become a key Gordon Brown government policy. Who, Guido wonders, will get paid all those fat fees for organising what are jumped up focus groups?

All this talk of Gordon’s Citizen’s Juries and Dave’s National Citizenship Service is confusing Guido. The U.N. lists the British form of government not as a democracy, but as a constitutional monarchy. So you are Her Majesty’s subjects not citizens. Whereas Guido is a citizen of a free republic…

Gordon’s pollster Deborah Mattinson sits on the board of Gordon’s think-tank, the Smith Institute. Her relationship with Gordon has been very profitable for her firm, OLR. According to today’s Sunday Telegraph, government contracts totalling some £3 milllion have come her way.

By coincidence OLR does a bit of polling for the Smith Institute for no charge. In February Guido queried who paid for their latest “92% favour Gordon” poll. OLR came back and said they had no paying client for the research. Nor did they have an identifiable paying client for their “What it means to be British” research in 2005. Shortly afterwards Gordon began loudly banging his Britishness drum. Opinion Leader Research has helped Gordon on “Britishness” issues before, their research was also used extensively in “New Britain” a 1999 publication produced by the Smith Institute. The pamphlet was itself singled out and explicitly criticised by the Charity Commission as being party political in the first 2001 investigation into the Sith.When the taxpayer is paying OLR £153,484.38 for one-day seminars it can’t be hard for OLR to do a bit of off-the-books work for the Smith Institute. The taxpayer is subsidising Gordon’s private polling, just as it subsidised the event hosting of Gordon’s Smith Institute at Downing Street.

Chris Grayling has written to the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell, asking him to investigate how OLR comes to win so many government contracts. Many market research industry competitors agree with Guido:- it is cronyism plain and simple.

Guido has only just found out that Harman was advised by Deborah Mattinson, the high-priestess of the Sith, Gordon’s personal pollster, Smith Institute board member and recipient of many juicy government contracts though her firm OLR.

It was her, Guido believes, that commissioned the YouGov poll showing that Harman had much needed appeal in the South East. That poll result featured heavily in Harman’s propaganda…

Guido has said it before and he’ll say it again, the way Gordon Brown’s pollster, Deborah Mattinson at Opinion Leader Research, gets contracts is not right.

Hidden away in an announcement made quietly on May 4, when all our attention was on the local election results, was the news that OLR had won another government contract to organise a one-day seminar.

£153,484.38 was the price the taxpayer paid OLR for a one-day seminar on the “The Skills Challenge: A Public Debate” in February. That should subsidise a hell of a lot of free polling for Gordon.

As if Gordon’s Sith allies didn’t have enough problems with the Charity Commission investigation, it appears that the Market Research Standards Board is to investigate Opinion Leader Research, Gordon Brown’s pollster. Guido called the Standards Board to get confirmation, but they said they could not comment on individual cases. When Guido asked them to confirm they weren’t investigating OLR, they declined.

Guido has previously noted the cosy closeness of the relationship between OLR, HM Treasury, the Smith Institute, Deborah Mattinson and Gordon Brown. Whenever more objective polls are gloomy for Gordon, OLR can be relied on to produce “Gordon more popular than sliced bread” stories.Other pollsters are very sniffy about OLR’s methodology and the fact that despite not even having a field team they still manage to win juicy government contracts, most recently for the polling for the London Olympics. It obviously helps to have contacts at the highest levels of government when bidding for those contracts…

Dizzy got a nice scoop* yesterday. Basically Silverfish TV have bought up gordonbrown4leader.com and similar sites. So what? Well Gordon doesn’t officially have a campaign and when he does he will be expected to list cash donations and donations in kind. The Electoral Commission is taking a tough line on this sort of stuff. Silverfish rushed out an explanation that they had bought the domain merely as a speculative punt to make money (something – as Dizzy points out this morning – is prohibited by the internet authorities). Guido frankly finds it unbelieveable that Silverfish really were going to try and make a quick profit out of Gordon Brown.

Silverfish.TV are Labour’s preferred new media / video producers, doing most recently Scottish and Welsh Labour’s Party Political Broadcasts. They also did the “Dave the Chameleon” video for Labour, for free. Obviously it costs quite a lot to do an expensive CGI animation, but they didn’t charge the Labour party a penny. They do however have a number of juicy contracts awarded by Labour cronies and paid for by the taxpayer.

Do you see a pattern here? The Smith Institute is paid thousands of pounds to organise seminars for HM Treasury at the taxpayers expense. The Smith Institute gets to use No. 11 Downing Street for seminars for free. Opinion Leader Research is paid huge amounts to do polling for HM Treasury. Opinion Leader Research does polling for the Smith Institute for free. Silverfish are paid by Downing Street at fat rates, subsidising them to do “Dave the Chameleon” attack videos and coincidentally buy campaign websites on Gordon’s behalf for free.

It is a corrupt practice, Gordon’s campaign bills are being picked up by the taxpayer indirectly. In a secretive, behind closed doors, third-world style, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours way”. He is running an undeclared campaign, it is funded, and no declarations are being made to the Electoral Commission because the funding is covert. Donors get tax relief from HM Treasury on donations to the Smith Institute, which is a charity of which Gordon is the only identifiable beneficiary. His pollster gets HM Treasury contracts and produces positive push polling for him. Labour’s friendly new media production outfit similarly wins Whitehall contracts and does work for Labour and Gordon for free. It has come to something when Nigerian newspapers are running stories about political corruption in Britain which feature the Smith Institute.

*Notice how despite Channel 4 News and the Times running with it, no credit was given to Dizzy. They say bloggers are parasitical leeches on the Dead-Tree-Press etc.

Guido has long respected the New Statesman’s Martin Bright as an investigative journalist, but his extended and continuing proximity to the Smith Institute seems to be compromising his objectivity. He wrote a very prissy and disingenuous defence of his employer, the New Statesman, when Guido pointed out that it is a Brownite fanzine which both cross-subsidises and houses the Sith HQ.

Now he is quoting discredited Sith propaganda in his article this week, claiming that Gordon Brown

is bolstered by a poll of 100 leading figures from the City, industry, media and politics carried out by Opinion Leader Research, which showed that 87 per cent believed what the Chancellor said, compared to 58 per cent for Cameron

That “poll of 100 leading figures from the City, industry, media and politics carried out by Opinion Leader Research” has zero credibility. The methodology is not one recognised by the rest of the polling industry. OLR is run by Brown’s personal pollster, Deborah Mattinson, she is always wheeled out with contrary “research” when Brown gets a bad press from negative polls from more objective organisations.

OLR also has a six-figure contract with HM Treasury. Martin Bright had the cheek to question Guido’s independence last month, how independent do you think that OLR poll might be?

Deborah Mattison also sits on the board of the Smith Institute and OLR does polling for them as well. The Sith’s office is all of six yards away from Martin Bright’s desk at the New Statesman. How independent is he?

The New Statesman publishes glossy corporate “sponsored supplements” for the Smith Institute, but not one single mention of the Smith Institute’s troubles has appeared on it’s pages…