Theresa May battles complacency as Tories’ U.K. election lead slips away

LONDON—Theresa May began the U.K. election campaign warning that polls giving her a 20-point lead could be wrong. Now, with her lead slashed, she’s hoping they are.

A series of missteps by May and her advisers, along with a populist Labour campaign, have put the prime minister on the defensive. Activists no longer laugh when she raises the prospect of a Jeremy Corbyn victory at her rallies and some have questioned the wisdom of building a campaign around her own personal brand, urging people to vote for “Theresa May and her team.”

Investors have awoken to the fact that May’s promise of “strong and stable” government— never mind a landslide to match Tony Blair’s in 1997—could be in jeopardy with the pound dipping after a specific poll showed May’s Conservative Party leading the Labour Party by just five points.

“The Tories are right to be worried if the momentum looks to be with Labour, but they can still turn it around,” Andrew Hawkins, chairman of pollsters ComRes Ltd., said in a telephone interview.

With a nation still in shock over the Manchester bombing and June 8 elections around the corner, May got back to the campaign trail and stuck to her script: that Labour leader Corbyn cannot be trusted to navigate Britain through two years of Brexit negotiations.

“It’s important as people come closer to that vote—that’s only next week—that they focus on the choice that’s there before them,” the prime minister told activists at a rally in Twickenham, southwest London, on Monday. “If I lose just six seats my government loses its majority, that could mean in 10 days’ time a government in chaos with Jeremy Corbyn in No. 10,” the prime minister’s residence in Downing Street.

But gone was the confidence when she stunned Britain by calling a snap election on April 18. On the day of the announcement, an ICM/Guardian poll gave May’s Tories a lead over Labour of 21 points and surveys in the following weekend’s newspapers suggested leads of 24 and 25 points.

Now, she is vulnerable to attack. Interviewer Jeremy Paxman quizzed May about her U-turns, in an interview on Sky News on Monday: “You have backed down over social care, and over national insurance. If I was in Brussels, I would think you are a blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire.”