How Even Traditional Tories Are Determined To Boot Rishi Sunak Out Of Downing Street
Paul Ellis from Romsey in Hampshire probably summed it up best.
“I think the Conservative Party need a shock and I want to give them a shock,” he told HuffPost UK this week. “I’ll be making a protest vote just to remove the Tories.”
The 67-year-old had just been canvassed by his local Tory candidate, Caroline Noakes, who has been the MP for the constituency since 2010.
He told her that taxes should be lower and that the UK’s defences should be stronger. Ordinarily, this would make him a natural Tory voter.
But the fact that he is so determined not to vote for the Conservatives demonstrates the main reason by Rishi Sunak is now in his final week as prime minister.
Even senior Tories now acknowledge that it’s no longer a question of whether Labour will win, but how much they will win by.
More evidence of this mindset came on Thursday when HuffPost UK revealed that Steve Baker, a government minister, is planning to launch bid for the party leadership within hours of polls closing on Thursday night.
Of course, that is predicated on him being able to hang on to the Wycombe seat he has held since 2010, but which Labour are now the clear favourites to win.
One experienced Conservative said: “There are two things that could happen on election day. Either I manage to win despite being a Tory, or I am swept away by the tide of anti-Tory feeling there is across the country.”
It is less than two months since Sunak provoked widespread derision by stating, after his party had suffered a nightmare in the local elections, that the UK was heading for a hung parliament.
Apart from those in the PM’s inner circle who allegedly put bets on a July poll, none of us knew until five weeks ago that he was planning to put his eccentric theory to the test so soon.
Unless the UK polling industry has turned in its worst ever performance, confirmation will come minutes after 10pm on Thursday of just how wide of the mark Sunak was.
That is when the all-important exit poll will be published by all the main broadcasters, thereby setting the narrative before a single result has been declared.
The representative survey of how people across the country voted has been remarkably accurate in recent elections, and there is no reason to think it won’t be again this time round.
It is virtually certain to confirm what the myriad of opinion polls have told us throughout the campaign – that Keir Starmer is heading to 10 Downing Street on the back of an enormous Commons majority.
The Labour boss demonstrated his confidence on Friday morning when he told Radio 5Live’s Nicky Campbell that he would resign if the party loses the election – something no leader says in advance unless they are certain they are going to win.
While Johnson and Truss delivered Sunak a hospital pass, only he is responsible for booting it in his own goal.
Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta, told HuffPost UK that a culmination of factors, going back to Boris Johnson’s time in No.10, have created the perfect political storm which is set to blow the Tories away.
He said: “We’re so used to the Conservatives winning, that their huge poll deficit has felt difficult to comprehend. The perceived wisdom was that the polls would narrow in the campaign, but that failed to account for the reasons there was such a deficit in the first place.
“An error-strewn campaign from the Conservatives, littered with gaffes and scandal, is just one of the factors that have made it impossible to claw back any ground on Labour, namely the return of Nigel Farage and the subsequent rise of Reform UK.
“This left Sunak’s early strategy of trying to win back Conservative to Reform UK switchers dead on arrival, meaning his pivot to win back Conservative to Labour switchers looked desperate and too little too late.
“While Boris Johnson and Liz Truss delivered Sunak a hospital pass, only he is responsible for booting it in his own goal. Currently the Conservatives are retaining less than half of their 2019 voters, with those voters abandoning a Conservative Party that’s lost its reputation for economic competence and good governance.”
With a poll lead in the 20s and just days to go until polling day, Labour could be forgiven for adopting even more of a safety first strategy than they have thus far in the campaign.
But a senior party figure said they planned to act as though the result remains in the balance and are taking nothing for granted.
The source said: “Many voters have still to make up their mind and many seats are still too close to call, so no one should assume the outcome.
“We’ll be saying that five more years of the Tories wouldn’t change anything. In fact, if they got another five years they’d think they could get away with anything.
“The country can meet its challenges but only if we vote for change next Thursday.
“We need a clear mandate and a strong government, so every conversation we have with voters between now and then matters.”
