For Conservative MPs opening their Daily Telegraph on Monday morning it was a distinctly gloomy start to the week: a mega-poll suggesting they are heading for a crashing general election defeat. And this was arguably an optimistic take.
For one thing, some pollsters believe the YouGov conclusion of a 120-seat Labour majority could be an underestimate. Additionally, the poll’s organisers seem intent on using its findings to push the party further to the right on immigration, a move that will dismay many centrist Tories, and seems unlikely to stop the rot.
The notable aspects of the poll come in two main parts. The first is its findings: YouGov surveyed 14,000 people and extrapolated the results to constituencies using the multilevel regression and poststratification model, or MRP. This predicted that the Conservatives would retain only 169 seats, 196 fewer than their 2019 total, while Labour would take 385, the Liberal Democrats 48 and the SNP 25.
This would be a disaster for the Conservatives, resulting in 11 current cabinet ministers losing their seats, among them Jeremy Hunt, Grant Shapps and Gillian Keegan. But it could – and might – be worse.
Rob Ford, a professor of politics at Manchester University, noted that the YouGov modelling appeared to play down the effect of tactical voting in many seats where Conservative MPs were at risk of challenge. “It doesn’t seem very credible to me that in a Tory-Lib Dem marginal, 10% of people would still support Green, and not care either way about the opportunity to get rid of a Conservative MP. It does suggest that things could be even worse for the Conservatives,” Ford said.
Another point of interest is the political backdrop to a large and very expensive polling operation. It was, the Telegraph said, commissioned by the Conservative Britain Alliance, a previously unknown organisation described only as a “group of Conservative donors”.
YouGov, the Telegraph added, worked with the Tory peer David Frost, who contributed an opinion piece arguing that the only way back from the brink for the party was to go much harder on immigration, seeking to tempt former Tory voters who are backing the Nigel Farage-founded Reform UK.
“The big problem is immigration, legal as well as illegal. That’s why this week’s vote on Rwanda is so important,” Frost writes.
The Telegraph runs its own analysis arguing that Reform votes would play a part in 96 losses for the Conservatives, making the difference between a catastrophic loss and a hung parliament. The combined message is clear: copy Reform, notably on small boats and on migration more generally.
Others, however, disagree. “The Telegraph analysis works on the basis that all these seats would come back if every single Reform vote went back to the Conservatives – that’s a mighty big ‘if’,” Ford said.
Even YouGov felt obliged to add a note to their in-house report on the polling to stress that the Telegraph analysis of Reform votes was “not a reliable way of measuring their impact”.
Ford added: “Where I do agree with David Frost is that the government is in a lot of trouble. But it doesn’t seem rational to me to endlessly focus on an issue where, the polling says, the voters don’t trust you, and you risk alienating the One Nation MPs.
“Tory MPs on the right think of the centrists a bit like Labour MPs think of the Lib Dems – they either pretend they don’t exist, or that if they do, they won’t do anything. And it’s true they are more squishy than the right of the party, but there are enough of them who are angry and can only be pushed so far.”
Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said that while the YouGov polling appeared solid, “the spin put on it by Frost and friends is something else altogether”.
He said: “Exhibit A would be their central claim that if Reform weren’t in the picture, the Tories could prevent Labour from winning an overall majority – a claim that depends entirely on the batty assumption that every single voter who would otherwise vote for Reform would vote Tory instead.
“Essentially, this is a laughably transparent attempt to scare Tory MPs into allowing the party, on the equally batty basis that immigration and woke are more important to voters than the economy and the NHS, to be pushed and pulled even further to the right – and the tragedy is that it might just work.”
