Boris in a landslide

Poll data tips Johnson to gain more than 50 seats in election

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is on track to secure a decisive majority of almost 50 seats at next month’s national election, according to an analysis of thousands of interviews from opinion polls.

Mr Johnson’s Conservative Party looks likely to score about 349 seats in the House of Commons, a gain of 57 seats, according to the results from number-crunching firm Datapraxis

and published by the Sunday Times newspaper in London.

And the main opposition Labour Party is on course to lose about 30 members of parliament, the model showed, leaving it with 213 seats. Aside from the Conservatives, the other big winner looks set to be the Scottish National Party. The model suggests it will regain 14 seats, and will cement its status as Britain’s thirdlargest party in terms of number of seats.

The predictive model incorporated data from 270,000 interviews conducted by polling company YouGov. A YouGov poll published earlier at the weekend showed Conservatives’ vote share at 42 per cent, 12 points ahead of Labour.

And the Britain Elects poll aggregator puts the Conservatives

on 42 per cent, ahead of the Labour main opposition on 29 per cent, the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats on 15 per cent, the Brexit Party on 6 per cent and the Greens on 3 per cent. The Conservatives have seen their popularity surge since Mr Johnson took over from Theresa May four months ago. They also seem set to benefit from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party pulling out their candidates from more than 300 seats being defended by the Conservatives.

It came as Mr Johnson prepared to unveil his party’s manifesto, pledging to move on from Brexit and austerity in a bid to secure a December 12 general election victory.

Mr Johnson sees Britain’s third general election in 4½ years as the only way to break the logjam on Brexit.