Tories face 1997-style wipeout at next election, large poll suggests

The Conservative Party is facing a 1997-style electoral wipeout that would hand Labour a 120-seat majority, a major opinion poll suggests.

A YouGov survey of 14,000 people indicates Rishi Sunak’s Tories could hold on to as few as 169 seats as Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour enters Downing Street with 385.

The polling, reported by the Telegraph, indicated that more than half the seats won in 2019 under Boris Johnson -including ever single ‘Red Wall’ seat – would be lost if the election was held now, in what would be the biggest collapse in support for a governing party since 1906.

The paper also reports that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt could be one of 11 Cabinet ministers to lose their seats, which would make him the first Chancellor to lose their seat at an election.

Support for Reform UK would be decisive in 96 Tory losses despite the Nigel Farage-linked party not picking up a single seat, the polling suggests, while the SNP would also suffer.

The research, using the multi-level regression and post-stratification method, was commissioned by a group of Tory donors working with former Brexit negotiator Lord David Frost.

Simon Clarke, who was a Cabinet minister under Liz Truss, said the result would be a “disaster”.

“The time for half measures is over,” he wrote on social media. “We either deliver on small boats or we will be destroyed.”

Among the other top Tories said to be on course to lose their seats are Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt and Attorney General Victoria Prentis.

i has not yet seen the research. However Patrick English, Director of Political Analytics at YouGov, said he was “confident this is the best possible model of vote intention, given our data, at this time”.