January 15, 2024 - 11:50am
A huge new poll makes grim reading for the Tories in today’s Telegraph. Based on 14,000 interviews, YouGov has used MRP techniques to produce detailed constituency results. In theory, it gives us the clearest picture yet of the seat-by-seat outcome of the next general election.
According to the poll, the Conservatives would be reduced to 169 seats, while Labour would win 385 — and an overall majority of 120. In all, 11 Cabinet ministers would lose their seats, including Jeremy Hunt and Grant Shapps. Penny Mordaunt and Gillian Keegan would also be defeated — thus knocking them out of the next Tory leadership contest before it even begins.
Overall, the geographical pattern of the Labour advance matches that of the Conservative landslide defeat in 1997. The Red Wall would be rebuilt across most of Northern England and much of the Midlands. There’d also be Labour success in the urban seats of the South — places like Ipswich, Bedford, Milton Keynes, Swindon, Gloucester, Bournemouth and Plymouth.
Then there are seats that Labour haven’t held for many decades — if ever. For instance, the party hasn’t gained an MP in Buckingham since Robert Maxwell won in 1964. Sixty years later, YouGov shows it turning red again. Another surprise Labour gain is Banbury, which the party has never held. On the YouGov map, there’s just one patch of blue left in all of Oxfordshire — David Cameron’s old seat of Witney.
The Tories are also projected to lose their grip on commuter-belt Surrey — where the Lib Dems pick up six seats. Who says nimbyism doesn’t pay? If its chances haven’t been blown by Ed Davey and the Post Office scandal, the party is close to building a yellow wall from Somerset to the borders of Kent.
Perhaps the weirdest result comes from the Isle of Wight. The island now has two Westminster seats, both of which will go red according to the poll. Wight has never had a Labour MP — and currently has just one Labour councillor. For the Tories, one loss here, let alone two, would be a sign of the end times.
And yet one shouldn’t put it past the party leadership to draw comfort from the YouGov results. A total of 169 seats is disastrous but not apocalyptic. What’s more, the party retains a few toeholds in Scotland and Wales, a better position than the total wipeout of 1997. Best of all, losses in the eastern English counties are limited — thus providing a potential springboard for recovery.
However, before they lapse into their complacent default mode, Rishi Sunak and his allies need to read the small print. Any poll — and especially any MRP poll — has to make assumptions in order to turn the raw data into headline results. According to the Telegraph report, the YouGov model “factors in the large number of undecided voters and which way they are most likely to vote”. This “electoral tightening” would narrow the red-blue gap.
In normal circumstances, undecideds who’ve voted Conservative before can reasonably be expected to revert to type. But as I argued last week, this time could be different. The party’s poll ratings aren’t just exceptionally low, they’re also persistently low — indicating an ingrained alienation that the Conservative campaign will find hard to shift. What’s more, if these voters can’t bring themselves to vote for Keir Starmer’s Labour or Davey’s Lib Dems then they do have other options, including Reform UK — or staying at home.
Even with these caveats, YouGov’s prediction is still an atrocious one for the Tories, the biggest loss of seats since 1906. However, if the assumption is wrong — and ex-Tory voters do not come home — then the actual result will be much worse.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeThey have no idea of the reckoning that is coming. And I think most pundits don’t either.
Their voting coalition is irrevocably fractured and both elements are irrevocably alienated.
I’m a former party member and I’ll never vote for them again, and so far, I’ve heard from none that will.
The Conservatives must now be replaced. Their time is up.
What’s worse is that the 2024 edition Conservative Party probably has no clear idea of what a conservative society actually is or what it looks like. I doubt very much that my local Conservative candidate would talk about conservatism as being about secure wages rewarding labour market engagement, owner occupied housing over BTL servitude, robust private pensions and the like.
As I look back at the last 14 years I have to wonder what conservatism has actually been brought about. Even leaving the EU (righteous as that was) just blundered along because no one was able to place it into a coherent conservative vision of national capacity. We’re all fretting about how to make ammunition, that is hoe denuded our capacity is!
What exactly is conservative about our young starting life with significant tuition debt and being in perma-BTL housing? What is conservative about immigration policies inducing wage arbitrage? What is conservative about a triple locked pension for property millionaires? At the simplest level to be a conservative a person generally speaking needs to have things to conserve. Why anyone under 50 would vote Conservative now is anyone’s guess. Everything has just been so short-termist rather than actually embedding conservatism. It has been corporatist rather than conservative.
Indeed it is interesting that the one person who seemed to me to at least ask the right questions (if only for a very brief moment) was not the populist Johnson or the ‘anti-orthodoxy’ Truss, but Theresa May.
Now, of course, it is hard to see that an identity-obsessed Labour Party is any more appealing. That’s not neutral.
And, for now at least, I have reservations about how far Reform would in the long term be able to avoid the traps that the Conservatives fell into. There’s a lot of froth with Reform, but, for now, I’m not seeing any beer.
And perhaps we all need to reflect on the state our political parties have lapsed into. The current state of the Conservatives is a symptom, the cause is that political parties have been hollowed out of their civil society content and become about special interests, be they identity or corporate, not people. But getting away from those interests will be easier to say than do.
Adding to your theme – Tufton st should be investigated – who’s been funding these ThinkTanks that have pulled the Tories in some of these directions. Much like the Koch network in the US ought to be too.
There was been no Conservatism and no Conservative Party since the last century and the Blairite Revolution. It has disavowed all the basic Tory principles- nation state, family, self reliance, pro enterprise anti welfare and became a silent adjunct and partner to the New Progressive Party State that Blair/Brown and the EU established as a permanent ruling clerisy. They are Fakes, teeming with ghastly wet proudly woke quasi socialist bufoons and cowards like May and Cameron. Why then your confusion over their total failures?? They bow at the knee and do vulgar things to a proto socialist NHS. They do not stop welfarism. They do not stop mass immigration. They do not challenge corrupt international law. They do do insane magic money bailouts and QE. They love the Regulatory Blob and vast shite University System. They happily play/,profit from the broken housing racket. They bow to the Green Gods of Net Zero and refuse to support taxation which incentivises wealth creation or enterprise. Both are Nasty and run counter to the DEI identitarianist Cult which all Righthinking London Progressives must follow. Why are you surprised??? The Revolution dismantled the powers of the Executive and Parliament, rendering flaky here today gone tomorrow politicians as meek underlings to their permanent Bosses in a Progressive State buttressed by a propagandist State media and 30 years of EU human rights laws. The Tories have not ruled for 13 years! The people did Brexit, not them!!! They are Progressive Quislings and no different from Lab or the Lib Dems in the ways they serve that 30 year New Order. Their defeat will make no difference whatsoever, as Labour are the Party of the Blob. Game Over.
“I doubt very much that my local Conservative candidate would talk about conservatism as being about secure wages rewarding labour market engagement, owner occupied housing over BTL servitude, robust private pensions and the like.”
If that’s your idea of Conservatism, you’ve been out of luck for a very long time.
It was Thatcher who so fetishised a “flexible labour market”, that she oversaw the destruciton of organised labour – leading to the collapse of job security, and, eventually, the zero hours contract. I’ll grant that Tories have generally cared about home ownership but, apart from Right to Buy, their housing policy has been completely ineffective in protecting the accessibility of home ownership (though Labour is no better) and, more of the Right to Buy sales ended up back in the rented sector as… Buy to Let. Rented to the same people at twice the rent.
As bad as the Tories have been, things will get so much worse under Labour. Voters deserve better.
They are separate wings of the establishment Uni Party, by what criterion could Labour do worse?
The British electorate will have the following choices, a “Quarter Pounder with Cheese” or a “Whopper With Cheese”.
The relish on the Labour burger might have a faint taste of socialism but the Tory burger will give you another 5 years of political food poisoning.
There is always a worse. Never underestimate the ability of the elected class to screw up anything.
Well – Keir Starmer knelt for BLM. So yes, there is a worse and for all the giddy talkboard discussion of the end of the Conservative Party, it is not neutral.
Labour at one point was talking gender self-ID though (in England) they’ve backed away from that for now.
Identity politics is the same sugar rush to the left that the EU is to the right. Like the EU, identity politics is free, lends itself to social media and there’s always something else to gripe about.
It says something about our political parties though doesn’t it – the choice is a globalist techbro or a man who knelt for BLM.
Starmer led a sustained sleazy (open) Elite-led political coup against the Brexit Vote, calling for a Second Referendum. In America Trump is labelled an ‘insurectionist’ for denying the legitimacy of their Vote. It is surely the most wicked thing a supposed democrat can do. Starmer is not a democrat. He should be clapped in chains and parked on a rotting hulk ship to Australia. How are we so forgetful?
I have less than 20 working years left, so Labour abolishing tax relief on pension contributions would count as a worse criteria for me (which, I imagine, they will do quite swiftly).
Starmer is much more radical and ideologically captured by net zero. This is a very big deal.
You could make a good argument that the Conservatives will get as many as 169 seats because people also fear Labour.
My only hope is that Labour with a majority of 120 seats will be even more prone to schism and lack of discipline than ever and perhaps have their ambitions blunted.
I have been a Conservative voter since 1979 and have donated over £800,000 to the Party and Vote Leave. I will never vote for the Party again and believe they must be utterly destroyed so comprehensive has been their betrayal of Conservative values and their shameful incompetence. £2 trillion added to the national debt, millions immigrants with none vetted for quality, no reform of the parasitic welfare state leading to 5.3 million out of work and on benefits, irreducible fiscal deficits and collapsing services, shameful and corrupt travesties of justice such as Rotherham, the post office and Greensill and no action to support the enterprise economy as evidenced by increasing current account deficits and weakening competitiveness. The worst government in British history.
Like you I want conservative voters to strike the Tory Party with an electoral Extinction Level Event.
The Liberal Party never came back from the general election result of 1926, it can be done again.
Let’s stop calling them the Conservative Party because that is a false claim, the word “Tory” can be delivered with the ferocity of an expletive and that is what they deserve.
Numerous conservatives in the US have said the same thing about Republicans. And nothing else happens. The same cast keeps being re-elected and whatever few new faces are voted into office are soon co-opted by our version of the blob.
Do you have reasonable expectations that another govt will address the debt, the migrant issue, the welfare state, or the other things you cite?
Trump?
The electoral landscape of the United States has not evolved for 200 years. In the UK things change at a glacial pace but I think we are about to have a major calving event at the base of the glacier.
There is palpable anger with the Conservative Government in the UK amongst conservative voters. In the US the primary selection process at least creates a forum where the people can listen to a conservative radical like Vivek Ramaswamy. We do not have the equivalent.
That the same Ramaswarmy who Trump just said isn’t really MAGA, is deceitful and really is for the other side?
I have heard of the comment but not the details.
It is a crude poorly aimed swipe at Ramaswarmy which indicates a panic gesture from the Trump Camp now they have calibrated the Vake surge.
The Vake is more MAGA than Trump, he is committed to closing down the FBI and Federal Education Department. 75% of Washington bureaucrats will be dismissed.
Current headline news in the US is “What Happens if Trump does not secure 50% of the primary vote”.
Vivek told voters that Trump was going to be removed by the Deep State so vote for Vived as he will pardon Trump – that a vote for Vivek is a real vote for Trump.
It was a very misguided political game – Trump responded by calling him out. It is all just political brinkmanship. I still think they get along.
Ok I can see what is motivating the personalities involved. They all fear Nicky Hayley getting through to the Whitehouse and thus 4 more years of Uni Party deepstate policy.
Trump was an indictment of the system, which is evident how both camps of the uni-party turned on him. And while people may listen to Vivek and even like what he has to say, they’re not going to make him the nominee.
There is the Senate – there is VP, there is 2028, 2032…
He is not in to win, he is laying foundations for the future.
I hope the US can wait that long and does not turn critical before then.
Interesting to get your local perspective. Given the weakness of the field what is the blocker between “while people may listen to Vivek and even like what he has to say” and “they’re not going to make him the nominee”?
I think there is a much clearer divide between Republicans and Democrats – on issues like immigration, net zero etc… The Tories are almost a carbon copy of Labour.
You need a Trump! Someone to get the people fired up to make Britain Great Again, – rather than managed decline, actually planned and executed decline.
Cameron, Boris Sunak are Scum. They hate you, and they hate Britain. That is just the truth. Same as 80% of all MPs and most of the nonhereditary Lords.
You are sheep being overseen by mutton eaters – to them you are just meat, dirty and annoying meat.
Seems very drastic. Have things really changed that much in the party since Johnson’s landslide? In defence of the Tories, they have had a very tough hand to deal with over the last few years. What disappoints me currently is the vacuum of policies and energy under the milquetoast Sunak.
And please, let’s not pretend things will improve under Sir Kneel Starmer.
A deserved outcome perhaps for the Party that killed growth and public services with austerity, compounded it with Brexit rubbish which massively distracted the country for crucial years, and then stupid enough to vote in leaders like Bojo and Truss. especially.
Maybe it’ll stimulate a replacement of Tories by Reform, or a Farage type take over. But that’s just missing the point. Those clowns would implode too. Whilst they might gain some support with anti-migrant slogans they’ve no real strategy solutions for everything else. In fact they’d be at loggerheads quickly on everything else. The fundamental problem for the Right is it’s spent 30 years finding scapegoats rather than really looking at what we need to do differently in the UK economy. The Thatcherite Right drove us into an economy too wedded to high Finance and the City with a worse North-South divide as a consequence. It’ll require a much deeper reflection than currently seems likely, but the Tory party has a history of being adaptive. A period of reflection is crucial to itself and to the UK, as a strong, thoughtful Tory party important to democracy.
You do understand that of the 30 years you talk about just under half were under a Labour government and another five had Liberal Democrats in coalition don’t you?
But this ‘replacement’ is an interesting point. The reason both Conservatives and Labour have declined is that they don’t really reflect the society we have now. We can have an argument about that but the coalitions that were represented by Conservative and Labour don’t really exist now. Hence we get corporate and identitarian capture – the coalition to fight off interest groups isn’t there. The AV and EU referendums just showed it up – for want of a better term a ‘culture politics’ not a classic class politics.
This is the strength Reform does, at this stage, undoubtedly have. That is a coalition that runs at least to some extent across classic party lines. 10% polling is more than a gripe about the EU (Goldsmith and the Referendum party were about 2-3%). I’m still not totally convinced by Reform, but they have adapted better to society as it is now. If the Conservative Party is replaced I would think that it would be by something that looks across classic party lines. At that point the PR can of worms would open, but leave that for another day.
I do think some of the ‘managerialism’, reliance on consultancies and v conservative economic policy of the Blair/Brown period has to share some of the blame for the directions we travelled. Fundamentally we have not grasped UK capitalism has some fundamental flaws which smokescreens like Brexit were never going to address – e.g: why isn’t more of our £2.5trillion in pension assets invested in the UK for a start? Why’ve we sold so many national assets to foreign actors? Why we so wedded to bricks and mortar, low risk investment that locks in inequality? etc
And as you’ll be able to tell I don’t think Reform offer anything to address those key reflections. Other than stronger anti-immigration rhetoric they are just more of the same ensuring UK remains trapped in a low wage economy – the paradox of course being the reliance on migrants to facilitate that. A few slogans no doubt about tax cuts, but fundamentally nothing that’d really change and certainly not if it upsets the ‘Golf Club’ bedrock (metaphor but you’ll get it). On health and social care for an aging population they are silent and that of course is part of the deception.
Ever considered being brief and to the point with your comments watson? Do you really need to make every comment so long-winded, lecturing and browbeating?
You’re rather like one of those righteous old priests forever reminding his congregation of their sinfulness.
Yes brevity from the pulpit when poss a reasonable request Sats. I guess I must instinctively know you need a bit more explanation?
The Old Priest a nice variant on the Centrist Dad too. Quite like that. Thanks. Hope that witticism on your part didn’t tax the neurons too much.
@jw Maybe you could offer some original socialist thinking pertinent to the 21st century?
I cannot see any air gap between the Conservative Government and the Labour opposition on a list of critical issues? How about:
(1) “Non Crime hate incidents” as invented in the past 10 years.
(2) The castration of children by the NHS.
(3) The willful destruction of Libya by the RAF and NATO.
(4) Covid Lockdown.
(5) Vaccination of children with poorly understood mRNA covid vaccines long after it was established children were not at risk from Covid.
(6) Establishment contempt for the investigation of Excess Deaths.
(7) The political persecution of British citizens by radical HR departments.
These are all cross party concerns but I do not know if a Labour Government would have done anything different.
Not sure I can offer a ‘socialist’ response to these FG, nor am I clear what you might mean by ‘socialist’. However what your list does show is you are possibly quite ‘well-to-do’ and have the luxury of complaining about fringe issues rather than those that are most important – cost of living, widening inter-generational inequality, our housing system, our health system, what’s gone wrong with UK capitalism, and how we prepare for Cold War 2 which are are essentially in already, as just a smattering.
I suspect on a number of your issues we might be in agreement key questions of accountability must be answered and further understanding of these important. I’d just tone down the vitriol and be probably a bit more prepared to listen, challenge and debate. They aren’t un-important, but they are fringe IMO.
My underlying point was for the benefit of conservative voters. Those 7 items illustrate that a conservative seeking a long-term replacement of the Tory Party by 2029 can safely vote Labour. Five years with a Labour Prime Minister will be indistinguishable. 500+ MPs across the benches are all members of the Establishment Uni Party, they think and act alike.
Political reform will have to wait util 2029.
As to your priorities:
“widening inter-generational inequality”, yes a massive problem and the most likely trigger for a Paris 1789 type event. But propose a modest reform like a large hike in death duties or the State grabbing equity in houses to pay for old age care and see how the nation responds. Or how about right-sizing old couples into social housing suitable for late middle age? How did that go?
Yes the NHS is broken. The British people broke it with their gluttony and indolence. There is no answer because it is the national religion.
Preparing for Cold War 2. Best avoid doing so given your other priorities that all require a ton of additional State spending. The Yanks are going to largely withdraw from NATO for ideological, regional and debt reasons. It is time to make Russia our new BFF.
In some regards therefore FG isn’t the Right’s task to imagine what the issues might be come 2029 and consider the policy responses that might work then? I suspect some of those you list will be distant history by then. Labour will have to deal with the hospital pass it’s likely to get in the meantime.
Oh dear. Everyone gets to _overexcited_ about all this. I’m a party member, and for me who remembers the 1990s, it’s deja vu all over again.
The Conservatives will recover, because our electoral system makes it very hard for a major party to be supplanted. It has only happened once, when the Liberals split noisily and permanently between the supporters of Asquith and Lloyd George. There is next to no chance of that happening with the Conservatives.
How long it takes them to recover and become electorally competitive again depends on how much of a grip they take of themselves, and what the world will look like in the late 2020s / early 2030s.
They are toast – everyone sees them for the horrible people and party they are. Bad times are coming, really bad. These wretches, with the rest of the uniparty, Labour, are out on a limb sawing it off – sawing it between them and the trunk.
Good times make soft men (1990s)
Soft men make hard times (Now very soon)
Hard times make Strong Men (coming)
Strong men make good times….
haha Ouroboros….
and these worms are the second stage….
And what will happen then? No, seriously. I understand the tribal allure of party politics; we have the same thing in the States, each side believing everything will be solved if their team wins. Except nothing is solved. More likely, new problems are created. Lather, rinse, repeat. So, again – what benefit to the average Brit will come of this meltdown? Maybe I’ll be surprised but I’m long past the idea of seeing the political class as much more than self-serving control freaks.
A conservative Conservative party would have been nice.
A Workingman’s Labour Party would have been nice too.
Surely you mean “even better than predicted”?
The best news I have heard so far this year