The damning poll that could inspire Tories to move against Sunak

The debate about whether Rishi Sunak’s Tories are heading for a 1992-style against-the-odds narrow election win or a 1997-style landslide defeat is pretty much settled now: it’s the latter.

A terrible few months for Sunak had been pointing that way in any case, but now a huge political data-dump has confirmed it. YouGov’s giant opinion survey and analysis, with a sample size of 14,000, published overnight in the Daily Telegraph estimates that the party is heading for 169 seats and that Labour will have a majority of around 120.

But for the Tories there is much more scope on the downside than the upside as regards this finding. To reach its Tory seat estimate, the YouGov team has assumed a degree of poll tightening will take place between now and election day, reapportioned the many ‘don’t knows’ in its sample in a way favourable to the Tories, assumed there will be no Lib-Lab tactical voting and also that Nigel Farage will not return to spearhead the Reform party’s election campaign. 

All of these assumptions may prove unjustifiably lenient on Sunak’s party, meaning that it is now possible to envisage a Tory parliamentary party returning in November of a size that could fit on a London double-decker bus.

As the former Downing Street pollster James Johnson makes clear in his commentary on the poll findings, there is no doubt that Sunak’s handling of immigration, both legal and illegal, is at the heart of a huge haemorrhaging of support among 2019 Conservative voters.

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And yet there are still scores of Tory MPs from among the 106-strong One Nation group who contend that the Rwanda Bill, which returns to the Commons this week, must not be toughened up because it is already at the outer limit of our obligations under international law. Some, such as the former cabinet minister Robert Buckland, will support amendments to further weaken the bill. This is despite both Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick – the MPs most immersed in the detail of immigration policy during the first year of Sunak’s premiership – having warned that the legislation is not sufficiently robust to achieve its aim of stopping the cross-Channel boats.

Conservative loyalists are today seeking to stem a leaching of votes to Reform by highlighting the YouGov finding that the challenger party will in effect gift many Tory-held constituencies to Labour and the Liberal Democrats without winning a single seat itself.

This time around such an attempt to mount a squeeze against a right-wing insurgency is highly unlikely to prove effective. Millions of ‘gut’ Conservatives appear to have reached the following conclusions about the state of British politics: Keir Starmer is only about 10 per cent worse than Rishi Sunak; the Tories, with their large phalanx of parliamentary patrician liberals, either can’t or won’t deliver on key policies including the socially existential requirement for meaningful border control; smashing them will clear space for a coherent force to emerge which can and will do these necessary things; therefore the Tories should be smashed.

A Farage comeback, which could happen amid a blaze of publicity as late as party conference season in September, would merely put the cherry on top of this particular cake. 

The vehemence of the language being used against Sunak’s political direction by some senior Tory MPs is very telling. Danny Kruger has spoken of the party facing obliteration, while Jenrick has written that were the government to turn down his strengthening amendments to the Rwanda Bill it ‘would be a betrayal of the British public. It would be utterly corrosive to trust in democratic politics given the promises that have been continually made for the last five years’.

These are not the kind of warnings capable political thinkers such as these two would issue unless they are envisaging meaningful action against their own leadership should it fail to heed them. 

Tory insiders are expecting more damning findings from the YouGov survey to emerge over the next 48 hours, including one that points to the potential upside of replacing Sunak with an alternative leader who has more credibility on immigration policy and other touchstone Conservative issues. It is therefore most interesting to read in the Times that Kemi Badenoch has been badgering the PM to toughen-up the Rwanda Bill.

The Prime Minister’s ‘centrist dad’ reshuffle – in which he sacked Braverman, brought back David Cameron and made James Cleverly Home Secretary – delighted establishment Tory commentators and effectively closed off the option of Britain bailing out of the European Convention on Human Rights under his watch.

Yet as some of us warned at the time, there is no substantial constituency of support for ‘liberal Conservatism’ that can be assembled for a 2024 general election. The centrist mums and dads are voting Starmer or Davey – depending on whose candidate is best placed to oust a sitting Tory where they live. Increasingly the gut Conservatives are intending to vote Farage or Tice. The ‘broad church’ Conservatism of Rishi Sunak is not going to survive these polarised times.