Roving Periscope: British PM Sunak’s Conservatives face worst poll rout in two centuries
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The United Kingdom, which in the 1970s-90s was laughing at India’s political instability, has itself seen five Prime Ministers in the last six years. This was the fastest turnover in new occupants of 10, Downing Street in nearly a century.
Of them, London saw three PMs in two months, setting a new record—with India-born Rishi Sunak becoming the first ‘alien’ leader of the ‘native’ political outfit in October 2022.
Now, as the UK hurtles towards snap polls on July 4, three opinion polls on Wednesday predicted a historic defeat for British PM Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, and that the Labour Party will comfortably win a large majority after 14 years in opposition, according to the media reports on Thursday.
Even PM Rishi Sunak may lose his own seat!
He admitted that people are frustrated with him and his party after more than a decade in power, dominated at times by political turmoil and scandal.
Polling by YouGov showed Keir Starmer’s Labour was on track to win 425 parliamentary seats in Britain’s 650-strong House of Commons, the most in its history. Another pollster, Savanta, predicted 516 seats for Labour, while a third, More in Common, gave it 406.
YouGov had the Conservatives on 108 and the Liberal Democrats on 67, while Savanta predicted the Conservatives would take 53 parliamentary seats and the Liberal Democrats 50. More in Common forecast 155 and 49 seats respectively.
Chris Hopkins, Political Research Director at Savanta, said its projection put Labour on course “for a historic majority.”
The three polls were so-called multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) surveys, an approach that uses voters’ age, gender, education, and other variables to predict results in every British voting district. Pollsters used the method to successfully predict the 2017 British election result.
They are largely in line with previous surveys predicting a Labour victory, but show the scale of the Conservatives’ defeat could be even worse than previously thought.
YouGov’s forecast of 108 seats for the Conservatives was around 32 lower than its previous poll two weeks earlier.
Both Savanta and YouGov predicted that the Conservative Party, once led by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, could be left with the lowest number of seats in its nearly 200-year history contesting elections.
PM Sunak, who in a final throw of the dice last week pledged to cut 17 billion pounds of taxes for working people if re-elected, has failed to turn the polls around so far in a campaign littered with missteps.
His task was made harder by the surprise mid-campaign return to frontline politics by prominent Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, a right-wing populist, whose Reform UK party threatens to split the right-of-center vote.
Britain has a first-past-the-post electoral system, meaning Reform could pick up millions of votes across the country without winning any individual seats.
YouGov predicted Reform would win five seats and Savanta none. More in Common did not give a figure for Reform.
The Savanta poll, published by the Telegraph newspaper, said Sunak could even lose his own parliamentary seat in northern England, once considered a safe Conservative constituency, with the contest currently too close to call.
All three surveys projected several senior government ministers, including Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt, were on course to lose their seats.
Most opinion polls currently place Keir Starmer’s Labour about 20 percentage points ahead of the governing Conservatives in the national vote share.
Other polls in recent days have also painted a grim picture for Sunak, with one pollster even predicting “electoral extinction” for the Conservatives.
