Sir Robert (Bob) Milton Worcester, 1933–2025

aged 91 years, will be best remembered as the Founder-in 1969-and long-term Chairman of MORI, Market & Opinion Research International, the household name for UK polling organisations for many years.Following the acquisition of MORI by French market research group Ipsos in 2005, he became International Director of Ipsos up to 2008 and subsequently Senior Adviser to Ipsos MORI.An American by birth, often describing himself as 'just a country boy from Kansas', he adopted dual UK/US citizenship in 2004 and was knighted in 2005 for 'outstanding services rendered to political, social, and economic research, and for contribution to government policy and programmes'.While not a statistician by training and laying no claim to being a practitioner, he had an uncanny knack of understanding the potential value of various techniques and procedures which could demonstrate and illustrate his psephological work.He was an early adopter of perceptual maps to show the relative image strengths and weaknesses of various politicians, frequently invoked regression analysis to show associations between variables and published an article on political triangulation.He presented a paper to an Ordinary Discussion Meeting of the Royal Statistical Society in April 1995, on Political Polling: 95% Expertise and 5% Luck.He hired me back in the early 70s, amongst other things to optimise the use of statistics in various aspects of MORI's work.