Ever since Rishi Sunak took over his party in October 2022, Conservative MPs have been debating his ability to recover their fortunes. The thinking tends to follow two precedents. Will he manage a 1992-style surprise victory, or is the Tories’ third prime minister in two years destined to lead the Tories into a painful, 1997-style defeat?
This week’s YouGov poll in the Telegraph predicting Labour would win a majority of 120 seats, were an election held now, makes the case for the latter option. According to the expansive poll, the Tories would face an electoral wipeout and lose every “red wall” seat they won in 2019. That result would also include multiple Michael Portillo moments – with 11 cabinet ministers, including leadership frontrunner Penny Mordaunt, tipped to lose their seats.
Sunak’s biggest internal critics have been quick to jump on the findings as evidence that – as David Frost puts it – there “will soon only be smoking rubble left” unless the Tories act fast. Depending on whom you speak to, that means going further on “stopping the boats” or even considering a change of leader, should that fail. “We are heading towards a cliff edge,” a backbencher on the right of the party tells me.
The Conservative party’s election strategist, Isaac Levido, played down the poll’s significance in a meeting with Tory MPs on Monday night – describing it as “just another poll”, when MPs “know your constituencies better than me, better than any media commentators and certainly better than any public pollster”.
The slight problem with this is that while many Tory MPs do not share the views of Frost (who was involved in the poll, which was funded by a previously unknown group of Tory donors called the Conservative Britain Alliance) on what would fix the party’s polling, the findings still ring true to many on the ground. As one Tory MP in a seat that narrowly makes it into the list of the 169 Conservatives who would survive tells me: “It doesn’t feel too far off, to be honest.”
In a way, the findings are unsurprising. “We’ve been 20 points behind for the best part of a year,” says one miserable Tory MP. But the issue is that, by this point, those MPs championing the 1992 scenario expected to see some progress. In Levido’s presentation, the slide that concerned MPs most was the one that showed the polling for both Labour and the Tories over the last year. “It showed we haven’t made any progress,” says an attender.
Last year Levido warned colleagues not to expect the polls to move much. This is also the line in Labour high command – that current polling is almost irrelevant, as not a single vote has been cast. Strategists on both sides will say that the campaign is when voters start to pay attention – therefore nothing should be taken for granted. Just before Christmas, Keir Starmer’s top aide, Morgan McSweeney, used his own presentation to the shadow cabinet to show how consistent poll leads in elections across the world had collapsed once campaigns got started.
But this isn’t much comfort to the Conservative MPs looking at the electoral calculus every time a new poll comes out to see what it might mean for them. These MPs are thinking ahead, to what life looks like post-parliament, and when is the best time to try to find a job. Dare they risk being one of a hundred MPs who have been recently made redundant trying to do so, straight after polling day? “There is an advantage to starting early,” says an MP mulling their options.
Ask a Tory MP how they feel going into the year of the election, and the replies do vary. As one former minister puts it: “The only thing I cling on to is that the public have not taken to Starmer.” Another has been encouraged by voters stopping them in their constituency to say they must “stop Labour”. But others are much more downbeat, with a backbencher replying – partly in jest – on how they are feeling about an election year: “ready for death”.
Some are trying to come up with personal strategies to try to exempt themselves from the trend. Others are hoping that by sticking with a Sunak safety-first approach they will reach a third option: minimising losses. “I think my mood has over the last few months gently degraded from thinking it’s possible to come back to parity to feeling like it is purely damage limitation, albeit at a rather higher level than the doomsday scenarios,” says a former minister. Several of the MPs who plan to vote for amendments to toughen up the safety of Rwanda bill say they are doing so in order to make a personal pitch to voters that they are on their side – even if the prime minister is not. Meanwhile, one MP suggested at Monday’s 1922 Committee meeting that he did not think the suggested strategy of focusing on the economy and arguing that the Tories have a plan, unlike Starmer, was the right one. “A lot of us will just try to campaign on our local reputations,” says an MP with a mid-sized majority.
Where the Telegraph poll could cause Sunak the biggest headache is with the 2019 intake. Its finding – that every single red wall MP who won in 2019 would lose their seat – is further incentivising the group to act as a separate bloc. These parliamentarians worry that Sunak’s electoral strategy is concentrated on shoring up Tory heartlands, rather than the 2019 coalition. It’s no coincidence that many of these MPs are backing amendments to toughen up the Rwanda bill.
Ultimately, many MPs are sceptical of the intentions of those behind the poll. As Levido put it on Monday night: “The people who organised this poll and analysed and timed the release of it seem to be intent on undermining this government and our party, and therefore the re-election prospects of every single one of you in this room.” This led to banging on tables in support. But the problem is even the MPs firmly backing Sunak fear its findings could soon come true.
Katy Balls is political editor of the Spectator
