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After 10 days of a general election campaign that has seen Rishi Sunak crisscross Britain by plane, train and helicopter, his party’s prospects for polling day on July 4 remain unchanged.
The consensus among pollsters, political scientists and veterans of Conservative campaigns in past elections is that despite his best efforts, Sunak will lead the Conservatives to their worst result in more than a generation, including the crushing defeat they suffered in 1997.
But how bad could it get for the Conservatives this time?
When asked what the polling figures show for the Conservative Party at this stage in the election, Chris Hopkins, director of political research at Savanta, replied in one word: “wildness.”
“At this stage, if things don’t change, I think Labour will get around 400 seats. I’d be surprised if they got less than that at this point.”
“I don’t believe the Conservatives will end up with fewer than 100 seats, as some polls suggest, but they could end up with just above triple digits,” Hopkins added.
Polling experts suggest the Conservatives could win between 110 and 200 seats, depending on how well they campaign, with several election experts saying: I Given the current figures, 150 seats seems the most likely outcome.
Deltapol director Joe Twyman said that despite the noise around many polls in the first week of the campaign, “the reality is that all polling agencies are not showing any significant change between now and before the election.”
He added: “The situation is [for the Tories] “It’s just as bad as it was at the start of the campaign. If the gap is 27 points, as YouGov predicts, that’s very bad for the Conservatives. And if the gap is 12 points, as JL Partners predicts, that’s very bad. They’re all pointing to the same thing, which is that as things stand, Labour will win a triple-digit majority.”
Canada’s ‘disappearance’ is the Conservatives’ biggest fear
The Conservatives’ biggest concern is that they will experience a similar outcome to the 1993 election, when the Conservative Party of Canada came to power and ran an election but was reduced from 156 seats to just two.
This extinction remains in folklore as a cautionary tale for all political parties, especially the Conservatives, who whisper about it like Voldemort, afraid to utter its name.
But Tim Bale, a political scientist at Queen Mary University of London, said it was unlikely that Mr Sunak’s Conservative Party would suffer a similar defeat within five weeks.
“Whenever someone mentions the 1993 Conservative Party of Canada, I’m a little skeptical because that’s the only time a party has been destroyed,” Bales says. “Frankly, I can’t imagine the Conservatives getting fewer than 100 seats. It’s not going to happen. In the worst case scenario, the Conservatives win 165 seats in 1997, 94 of which they had held since the Second World War.
“If things continue to deteriorate as they are now, Labour’s number of seats could be reduced to 150. It seems Labour is shooting itself in the foot.”
Both Labour and the Conservatives are running a cautious election campaign, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer keen to avoid any last-minute mistakes and focused on showing voters that the country will be in safe hands under Labour.
Meanwhile, veteran Conservative campaigners believe the party is looking to do “damage minimisation”, trying to stem losses and hold on to as many seats as possible – as exemplified by Mr Sunak’s decision this week to campaign in constituencies such as Bosworth, where the Conservatives hold a majority of more than 26,000 votes.
“The Conservative brand is in a terrible state”
Lee Cain, the former Downing Street communications director who was at the heart of both the Vote Leave campaign and Boris Johnson’s 2019 general election victory, said the fundamentals of the election facing Mr Sunak made a major defeat almost inevitable.
“Every election is either change or a repeat of the same thing, and just from the research we’ve done, we know that in all of the core battlegrounds, people are looking for change,” said Cain, now a founding partner at political strategist Charles Bee. I.
Mr Cain said that in all key policy areas, including immigration, the NHS and crime, people felt the situation was worse than it was in 2019, before the pandemic, and arguably compared to 2010.
“When you go into that environment and position yourself as a status quo candidate, I think it’s going to be very hard to win an election,” he added.
A former Downing Street adviser has argued the Conservative leader had a brief window to change the party’s political fortunes when he first came into Downing Street, but his decisions to prioritise a smoking ban and A-level education reforms “misread the public mood”.
That missed opportunity, plus the chaos he inherited after the disastrous governments of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, have left him with mountains to climb.
“The Conservative brand is in a terrible state,” Cain said. “Given the damage done to the end of Boris’s government and Liz Truss’s role in the financial crisis over the last two years, effectively putting the Conservative name on the line, I think it will be a major defeat for the Conservative party.”