Tories braced for by-elections defeat as Reform eats into the vote

DOWNING STREET is braced for defeats in both by-elections being held today, as a new opinion poll shows one in five Conservative voters are abandoning the party for Reform.

Voters go to the polls today in Wellingborough, where Conservative MP Peter Bone was forced out after a scandal, and Kingswood, where Tory MP Chris Skidmore quit in protest over a watering down of climate policy.

Rishi Sunak has stayed away from both campaigns, not visiting in the final week amid wider signs that the Conservative leadership believes it has little hope of holding either seat.

Party insiders are preparing to argue that governments rarely win by-elections, though a surprise victory is not impossible – such as in Boris Johnson’s former Uxbridge seat last year.

Nationwide, opinion polls show Labour close to 20 percentage points ahead on voter intentions, creating despondency on the Tory backbenches.

Part of the reason for the Conservatives’ polling woes is that increasing numbers of voters are considering backing Reform, the political party to the Right of the Tories.

Polling published by research consultancy WPI Strategy suggests that one in five people who voted Tory in the 2019 election plan to vote for Reform. The poll asked for the views of about 4,000 people earlier in the month.

Today, it will be announced whether the UK economy is in a technical recession when the figures for economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2023 are published.

A second successive quarter of contraction would undercut Mr Sunak’s pledge made at the start of last year to get the economy growing.

The Prime Minister was given a surprise political boost yesterday when inflation did not rise as expected in the year to January. It was found to be at 4 per cent, which was the same figure given for the previous month – though that is still double the Bank of England’s 2 per cent inflation target.

It comes as Dr Kieran Mullen has become the 58th Tory MP to announce that they will stand down at the next election as the party draws closer to its 1997 record for Commons resignations.