And suddenly, this is very interesting

IF anyone thought the general election called last week would lack interest, it’s time to think again.

The suggestion that the Conservatives have a 10% lead over Labour in Wales, and that they could become the majority party here, is a possibility that would previously be seen as in the realms of fantasy politics.

If it did come to pass, such a result would represent an historic shift of major importance.

In recent years, as Labour at first lost power in the Scottish Parliament and then ceded its position as the main opposition party, Welsh Labour was able to imagine that it was immune to such decline. A view developed within the wider Labour Party that Welsh Labour has become a trusted brand that could somehow rise above the in-fighting that has characterised the party since its general election defeat in 2015. Such a complacent perspective was validated by last year’s Houdini-like performance in the National Assembly election, where its loss of just one seat was portrayed as a vote of confidence in Carwyn Jones and the competence of his Welsh Government.

But the outcome masked a significant decline in Labour’s vote. It’s fair to say that Labour did better than it deserved because of the fragmented nature of its opposition. It doesn’t have a single opposing party like the SNP which for the last decade has scooped up a high proportion of former Labour voters. Instead, voters who oppose Labour have supported a variety of other parties – a pattern which in a significant number of seats enabled Labour AMs to retain their first-past-the-post seats with relatively low shares of the vote.

The new poll suggests that Welsh Labour’s luck may have run out. While its level of support has dipped again, the crucial factor is that the Conservatives have had a surge, largely at the expense of Ukip.

In recent elections the concern from Welsh Labour’s point of view has been that too many of their voters might vote Ukip and let the Tories in. That didn’t happen to any great extent – and it can be said in retrospect that Ukip’s strong performance in Wales may have prevented the Conservatives from winning seats they would otherwise have won. At Bridgend in 2015 the Ukip vote was more than three times Labour’s majority over the Conservatives, for example.

On June 8, with all indications pointing to a collapse in Ukip’s vote with most of its former supporters switching to the Tories, Welsh Labour could be in for a cataclysmic series of local defeats.

Unless there is a serious uplift in Labour’s fortunes over the next six weeks, the party is facing meltdown on a Britain-wide basis, and the humiliation of losing what previously has been seen as a heartland area. If Labour can’t win in Wales, where can it win?

The party could find itself largely destroyed across the UK – and fighting for survival even in Wales, where its support base has never previously faced such a threat, even in the darkest years of Margaret Thatcher’s hegemony. The Western Mail newspaper is published by Media Wales a subsidiary company of Trinity Mirror PLC, which is a member of IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The entire contents of The Western Mail are the copyright of Media Wales Ltd. It is an offence to copy any of its contents in any way without the company’s permission. If you require a licence to copy parts of it in any way or form, write to the Head of Finance at Six Park Street. The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2014 was 78.5%