The Conservatives are facing a historic defeat at the election after a bombshell new poll suggested the party could be left with just 53 MPs – and Rishi Sunak would not be among them.
Adding further misery to a raft of dire poll results for Mr Sunak, it also predicts he faces becoming the first sitting prime minister to lose his seat.
And with 50 MPs, the Tories could be battling the Lib Dems for second place.
The Savanta and Electoral Calculus polling analysis puts Labour on course to take 516 seats, an estimated majority of 382 – twice the size of Sir Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide – suggesting recent Tory warnings of a Labour “super-majority” are correct.
While Nigel Farage’s Reform was not predicted to win any seats, a separate mega-poll by YouGov added to Mr Sunak’s woes, suggesting the successor to the Brexit Party would return five MPs to Westminster.
It found Mr Farage would finally become an MP at the eighth attempt.
And his party would also beat Tory chair Richard Holden, in a seat he faced accusations he had ‘stitched up’ for himself.
Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta said the “stark” figures were a consequence of what he described as an “almost unique set of events conspiring against the Conservative Party this election”.
These included Mr Sunak’s D-Day gaffe, when he left the commemorations early to record a TV interview, and the rise of Reform UK. But they also included more longer-term challenges including the mini-budget and Partygate, he said.
He added: “We’ve been conditioned for so long to believe the Conservative Party, as the natural party of government, will always be a major political force. But our MRP projections – in partnership with Electoral Calculus – suggests that they will be fighting with the Liberal Democrats to be the Official Opposition, with Labour on for a historic majority.”
He added that his polling firm currently rate nearly 200 seats as “too close to call, meaning just small changes could have a huge impact on the outcome of this election”.
YouGov predicted Labour was on course to achieve a 200-seat majority.
It found Labour would take 425 seats, with the Tories on 108, the Liberal Democrats 67, SNP 20, Reform UK five, Plaid Cymru four and the Green Party two.
Earlier, another mega-poll, by More In Common UK, found the Conservatives on course for their worst defeat in more than a century with high-profile names including Jeremy Hunt set to lose their seats.
Luke Tryl, executive director of More In Common UK, which carried out the research, said the findings showed that the Tories were in a “deep hole” and the problem was getting worse.
The poll, of more than 10,000 people, suggests the Conservatives would hold on to just 155 seats, their worst total since 1906.
The polls all used a technique called multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP) to model results at constituency level.
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