Survey predicts Rishi Sunak will hold on to his Richmond seat in North Yorkshire 'by a whisker'. Photo / AP
Survey predicts Rishi Sunak will hold on to his Richmond seat in North Yorkshire 'by a whisker'. Photo / AP
The Tories could win just 66 seats in the UK general election, the first MRP poll of the campaign suggests.
The new analysis would put the Conservatives on course for their worst electoral performance ever, by some margin, with Labour securing a landslide 476 seats and the Lib Dems 59.
Large-scale MRP polling by Electoral Calculus surveyed 10,000 people taking tactical voting into account and was published on Friday night by GB News.
It puts Labour on 46 per cent, the Tories on 19 per cent, Reform UK on 12 per cent without any seats, and the Lib Dems on 10 per cent, with a 48-seat gain.
The survey also predicts 18 Conservative Cabinet members could lose their seats, including Oliver Dowden, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt.
It suggests Rishi Sunak, the current Prime Minister, will hold on to his Richmond seat in North Yorkshire “by a whisker with a massively reduced majority” of three per cent over Labour, according to Marwan Riach of Electoral Calculus.
The Green Party is at eight per cent support in the poll, while the SNP is down to three per cent and would lose almost half of its 43 seats in Westminster.
If Labour were to win this 302-seat majority, Sir Keir Starmer would pull off a landslide that eclipses even that of Tony Blair in 1997, when the party won 419 seats after 18 years of Tory rule.
The Conservatives would fare worse than the 165 MPs returned by John Major in 1997.
Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, right, and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer in 2023. Photo / AP, Pool
Even without tactical voting factored in, the Tories are predicted to win just 72 seats in the poll to Labour’s 493.
The SNP would win 22 seats, nearly half their current 43 seats, while Plaid Cymru would get four and the Greens two.
The MRP polling method stands for multi-level regression and poststratification and YouGov’s MRP poll correctly predicted the 2017 UK general election result, including upsets in Kensington and Canterbury, while more traditional polling methods were incorrect.
YouGov’s first MRP poll of the campaign is expected in the coming days.
The Tories’ current 365-seat majority is widely forecasted among pollsters to be severely depleted at the forthcoming election, but none have predicted a result as low as 66 seats.
The party’s fortunes are not helped by more than 100 Conservative MPs standing down.
Another surprise from the poll might be for Reform UK, whose leader Richard Tice and honorary president Nigel Farage have expressed confidence in recent days that they will send multiple MPs to Westminster and prove a more effective opposition to a Starmer-led government.
The Telegraph’s current poll tracker puts Labour on 44.7 points to the Conservatives’ 23.4, with Reform UK third on 11.2, the Lib Dems on 9.5, the Greens on 5.8 and the SNP on 2.7.
Since the election was called on May 23, the Tories and Labour have gone up in the polls while Reform UK have slightly decreased and the Lib Dems have remained broadly level.
