Stunningly awful poll must shake Sunak out of his complacency

Prime Minister must end focus on net zero and tackle the real issues if he wants to win back support

You may find it hard to believe, but one of the biggest problems the Conservative Party faces at the moment is complacency. We’ve heard a lot of it this week – that the British people will never vote for Sir Keir Starmer, that no party has ever lost a big majority in one go, that we are in a 1992 scenario where we Tories can still grind out a tight victory if we all stick to the plan.

That has always involved not just an implausible leap of faith, but a deaf ear to the disdain with which many, many British voters now view the Tory party – the “scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt, and anything that may not misbecome the mighty sender”, to borrow Exeter’s words to the Dauphin in Henry V.

Yes, it’s obviously true that Sir Keir isn’t particularly popular. He doesn’t need to be.

The Yougov poll that The Daily Telegraph has published today, which I have been involved in shaping and analysing, ought to put this complacency definitively to bed.

Its results are stunning – stunningly awful. It makes clear that the Tory party faces a 1997-style wipeout, if we are lucky. The party will lose nearly 200 seats, the worst loss of seats since Arthur Balfour in 1906, and Labour will get a majority of 120.

That majority is slightly smaller than Blair’s only because the SNP will still hold 20-odd seats that were Labour in 1997 – hardly a reason for joy.

I’ve been warning about this for months. In truth, existing polls already show it. But it is too easy for complacent Tory MPS to dismiss them as misleading. That’s not possible with this poll.

These MRP polls have huge samples and give us detailed constituency-level data. They don’t rely on the same sort of back-of-an-envelope extrapolations to get seat results from the headline number. They have a track record of accuracy. This poll shows we are going to lose, and lose bad, unless we do something about it.

Nor can MPS say “well, the polls will tighten when the election is on us”. This Yougov MRP is robust to much of this, taking into account ex-tory “don’t knows” and assuming some will in the end vote in the same way as those demographically and politically like them. Tightening is therefore factored in. Without this, the Tory party wouldn’t get much more than 100 seats.

Nor does it factor in any further boost for Reform UK. Just imagine if Nigel Farage delivered on his hints and came back to politics. Two or three extra points for Reform, a bit more tactical voting, and this might start to look like an extinction event.

What we see is that the 2019 coalition has collapsed. In 2019, the Tories became a truly national party for the first time since 1983, winning big all over the country. That now reverses out. The Red Wall disappears and every one of the seats we won in the North and Midlands in 2017 and 2019 is lost again.

But this isn’t balanced out by any corresponding gain in the South. We lose almost half of our seats in the South East, too. Chichester and Horsham, both with 20,000-plus majorities, go Lib Dem. Banbury, Aylesbury and Basingstoke, Tory seats since the 1920s, go Labour.

And many familiar names, or at least Cabinet members, go too – Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Steve Baker, Greg Hands, Simon Clarke, Johnny Mercer, Iain Duncan Smith, the Defence, Education, Justice, Scottish, and Welsh secretaries, and the Chief Whip. Jacob Rees-mogg hangs on by the skin of his teeth.

None of this is driven by huge Labour popularity. It is the result of the collapse of our vote, a collapse itself driven by dissatisfaction on policy – cost of living, tax, the health service and, above all, immigration.

Three-quarters of the voters who have left us are Leave voters. Even now, this group puts the Tories ahead of Labour on the economy. The big problem is immigration, legal as well as illegal. That’s why this week’s vote on Rwanda is so important.

One has to have some sympathy with the Prime Minister. He didn’t choose his inheritance, and he has an unruly party to manage. That’s not his fault. But it is his problem. Whatever the strategy is – and it is often hard to discern one – it isn’t working.

We aren’t dealing with people’s real problems. We push on with net zero, the health service is getting worse, we aren’t building any houses, we don’t defend Brexit and we leave the field to disgruntled Remainers who are telling everyone it is failing. And, above all, we don’t look determined to do whatever it takes to control the borders.

There is only one way to rescue the position and bring back those 2019 voters who have left us. It is to be as tough as it takes on immigration, reverse the debilitating increases in tax, end the renewables tax on energy costs – and much more. It is to set out a vision for why Conservative Britain will be different to the immigration boosting, Brexit-undermining, taxing, spending, regulating, nannying, hectoring nightmare that Labour will bring. And it is to stop doing all those things ourselves.

I keep saying there is no future for the Conservative Party purely as the voice of the rich, the well-off, the house-owners, the people who feel they are secure in life. Of course we want them. But we want more – the workers, the people who want to end mass immigration, the small business owners, the unwilling renters still paying off student debt, the people who want to buy a house, have a family, get on with life.

At the moment, we are giving them nothing. This poll shows what will happen if we don’t change that. Like Henry V, the people are coming for us “in fierce tempest, in thunder and earthquake”. If we don’t act, there will soon only be smoking rubble left.

‘None of this is driven by huge Labour popularity. It is the result of a collapse driven by dissatisfaction’