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EXCLUSIVE

Tories will win 98 seats to Labour’s 468, says poll

This is real public anger, Duncan Smith warns as MRP survey of 15,000 people puts even Sunak’s seat at risk
ILLUSTRATION BY TONY BELL

Rishi Sunak’s Easter message hailed the start of spring: the season of hope, rebirth and renewal. Delivered after a damaging few weeks, he welcomed the “chance to pause and reflect”. But as he hurtles towards a general election, a new mega poll offers little hope he can resurrect his party’s electoral fortunes.

The seat-by-seat analysis shows Tory prospects have hit a record low and they are on track for their worst election result, winning fewer than 100 seats. Labour would win 468, giving Sir Keir Starmer’s party a whopping 286-seat majority.

The 15,000-person MRP poll, conducted by Survation on behalf of Best for Britain, puts Labour on 45 per cent of the vote share with a 19-point lead over the Conservatives, up three points from the campaign group’s previous poll at the end of last year. The Tories are on track to win just 98 seats, with none in Scotland or Wales. Undecided voters were not accounted for in the survey but represented about 15 per cent of those asked, which is at the lower end of most polls. The Tories are pinning their hopes on winning them over when the country finally goes to the polls.

The forecast even suggests the prime minister is at risk of losing his own constituency, the new Richmond & Northallerton seat, to Labour, with his lead less than 2.5 percentage points. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has a one-point lead over the Liberal Democrats in his new seat of Godalming & Ash.

The poll will reignite efforts by those plotting to topple the prime minister. Lord Frost, the former Brexit secretary and a vocal critic of Sunak, said the figures showed the “desperate situation” the Conservative Party was facing. “The polling is getting worse over time, not better,” he said.

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“The Tory party needs to face up to the reality that its current policies have alienated huge numbers of our ­voters. Only a shift to properly conservative policies, to deliver the change in the way the country is run that people voted for with Brexit, can alter that. It’s not too late — but time is running out.”

Sunak’s aides fear he could face a leadership challenge after the local elections if, as predicted, the Tories face a humiliating wipeout. Some of his closest advisers are urging him to hold a summer general election amid fears his position could become untenable.

Rishi Sunak issues Easter Sunday message

In a prescient blog last week, Dominic Cummings, the former No 10 adviser, wrote that Westminster had “underrated the possibility that after the disastrous May elections, enough Tories trigger a vote of no confidence and Sunak resigns. I think they underrate the possibility of the chaos leading to him calling an election before summer and they underrate the possibility that a rough average of MRP results is right and the party is heading for its worst result ever. Generally now MRP models in Britain work well if done properly.”

The problem for both Downing Street and the rebels is that there seems no real way out, with efforts to oust Sunak as likely to lead to disaster as him remaining — leaving the Tory party in a circular firing squad facing the apocalypse whichever way they turn.

“This is all about a real anger with the government,” Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, told Times Radio in response to the poll. “I can fully understand that. There are things the government has got to get straight. Bring inflation down, interest rates down, taxation down. Get [Rwanda] flights off the ground … We have a few months to make sure people are better off.”

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Fresh talk of an early election has already led to renewed discussions about a coup to stop Sunak leading the party into that battle.

“If Sunak tried to call an election I think there would be a real risk of an unedifying situation when a serious attempt would have been made to remove the PM before the final dissolution of parliament,” said one Tory MP. “There were certainly several MPs who said they would have immediately put letters in to force a confidence vote.”

A total of 53 MPs would need to sign letters of no-confidence to force a vote. Rebels claim they are in the mid-20s now, with at least another ten expected to fall in.

Even if Sunak won a confidence vote, a leading rebel organiser said he could not go to the country: “He’d go into a campaign saying: ‘Vote for me. Don’t worry about these guys behind me who want to kill me.’ It would be the most insane election campaign in history.”

How mandarins could block an election

There is also talk of an election being blocked by mandarins in Whitehall and royal courtiers. High-level discussions have already taken place about invoking the Lascelles Principles, a constitutional convention under which a monarch could refuse a request from the prime minister to dissolve parliament to call an election.

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This can only happen if three conditions are met: that the existing parliament is “vital, viable and capable of doing its job”; if a general election would be “detrimental to the national economy”; and if the sovereign could “rely on finding another prime minister who would govern for a reasonable period with a working majority”.

If these tests were met, Sunak could be stopped from holding an election but would face a confidence vote in the Commons, which he could survive. The plotters think the only way he could be removed cleanly would be if he was prepared to walk away.

In Downing Street they argue that Sunak can turn things around and undecided voters will move back to the Tories when they see the economy improving. However, the poll comes amid claims from cabinet ministers and their aides that Sunak’s toxic combination of control freakery and indecision has paralysed the business of government, which renders stringing things out pointless.

“Rishi’s selling point was supposed to be that he might be a bit crap at politics but he’s good at governing and is quietly getting on with running the country,” a minister said. “But Downing Street is a black hole, it is where policies go to die. No one can get a decision out of them.”

A ministerial adviser blamed Sunak’s quest for compromise and his lack of strong political instincts. “It takes an age for him to make a decision because he triangulates everything. He doesn’t have that instinctive feel and say: ‘That’s the right answer, we’re going to do that even if we piss off a group of people.’ Instead he looks at all the detail and thinks, ‘Oh, they’ve got a point, and they’ve got a point. Maybe there’s some compromise position in the middle.’ And he comes to that decision in months, not weeks, and when you arrive, nobody’s happy and everyone ends up pissed off.”

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‘Worse than it was under May’

These despairing Tories share Labour’s critique that Sunak is out of touch. “He doesn’t know who his voters are,” the adviser said. “Now, on a whole range of issues, they’re terrified of rebellions, so it slows everything down even more. The Criminal Justice Bill, the Sentencing Bill, the smoking thing, they just kicked into long grass.”

A second adviser said: “It’s worse than it was under Theresa May. Cabinet committees, other than on national security issue stuff, simply do not meet. You’ve got the worst combination of total command and control from the centre, but without any actual direction of policy other than on his few pet projects.”

Insiders also say Sunak is personally uptight, and even think his regular fasting is making him “hangry”. A senior figure in Whitehall said: “It is not sufficiently understood how angry the PM is. He’s tetchy and pissy to people.”

Plans in the Tory manifesto to help renters were stalled for months and then ditched. The same happened with planning reform. Leasehold reforms are also mired in delays. Sunak has also failed to grasp the nettle when it comes to compensation for victims of child sex exploitation.

Another blockage is Sunak’s response to the contaminated blood scandal, where final recommendations on compensation were made almost a year ago.

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The government’s inertia was apparent in the baffling decision to delay the passage of the Rwanda bill. Such has been the confusion as to why the second round of ping-pong between the Commons and the Lords was postponed until after the Easter recess even the King has been blamed for delay.

Government sources claim Charles “let it be known” that he required two weeks’ notice on legislation before he would give his agreement to make the bill into an act. Buckingham Palace dismissed the claim as “completely and categorically untrue” and said royal assent could take “less than 24 hours”.

Leadership rivals plot to replace Sunak

So who would want this toxic inheritance and could they do anything to turn things around for the Tories? The seat-specific results of the MRP poll make difficult reading for the cabinet, suggesting many of them — including those tipped to become the next leader — are set to lose their seats.

This includes the favourite, Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, as well as leadership hopefuls James Cleverly, the home secretary, and Grant Shapps, the defence secretary. Of those rumoured to be in the race to replace Sunak, only Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, is set to comfortably retain her seat in Saffron Walden.

Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, and Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, are on course to hold their seats, each with a five-point lead over their nearest rivals, while Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Priti Patel’s seats have become marginal under the boundary changes.

In yet another worrying development for the prime minister, separate polling by the campaign group More in Common found Labour’s lead over the Tories would shrink by six points if Mordaunt, rather than Sunak, was Tory leader. With the Portsmouth North MP as leader, the Tories would be on 28 per cent, with Labour on 43 per cent (a 15-point lead), compared with 23 per cent under Sunak with Labour on 44 per cent (a 21-point lead). In contrast, the Labour lead would grow by four points if Badenoch was leader.

The threat from Reform UK

The MRP poll does provide a road map for a new leader to regain some ground. It showed Reform UK’s share of the vote surging across the UK, with the party set to come second in seven seats and their overall vote share up to 8.5 per cent, just behind the Liberal Democrats on 10.4 per cent.

To assess the effect of Reform UK, Best for Britain looked at the impact of the party agreeing to “stand aside” for the Conservatives, as the Brexit Party did in half the seats in 2019. People planning to vote for Richard Tice’s party were asked who they would vote for if the party did not stand a candidate in their constituency. In this scenario the Conservatives would win 150 seats — a more than 50 per cent increase in their total seat haul. Undecided voters were not accounted for in the survey but it is understood they were about 15 per cent of those asked, which is at the lower end of most polls.

That leaves open the possibility that a new leader could take a line on immigration and public services which would appeal to voters who backed Boris Johnson in 2019 but have switched to Reform.

One MP said conversations were no longer about winning the next election, but merely saving as many Tory seats as possible. “They would have two or three months at least,” a rebel said of a replacement for Sunak. “You could say you’re going to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. If you have a good few months, why can’t you get 30 points in the polls? It’s eminently possible you close that gap. In that scenario, you hope that you’re going to have 200-plus MPs, not 150 or lower, because then you’re out for ten years.”

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader who is forecast to lose his seat of Chingford & Woodford Green, urged the PM and his colleagues to hold their nerve. “Those of us in marginal seats know only too well that the public … are not desperate for a Labour government,” he said.

“The last thing we should do is … change the leadership when the key thing is that we give the economy time to grow, [for] interest rates to come down, put the difficult times behind us and show the public the real danger Labour poses with their unsustainable rush to net zero that will cost trillions of pounds to taxpayers.”

However, Naomi Smith, the chief executive of Best for Britain, said the MRP poll “shows we are headed for a change election of unprecedented proportions and major swings as the electorate switches support away from the Tories in different directions.

“Under a first past the post system, and with most voters not knowing who is in second place in their new constituencies, we will be providing voters with state of the art polling analysis at www.getvoting.org to give them the information they need to make sure their vote counts.”

A government source said: “This just goes to show a vote for Reform is a vote for Labour. They have no plan and would take us back to square one.

“We’ve seen a lot of polls and predictions. The polls said Leave would lose; they won. Polls said the 2017 election would result in a landslide but we lost our majority. There’s only one poll that matters and over the next few months we will focus minds on the choice between our plan to build a brighter future and Labour’s lack of a plan.”

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