LONDON – British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would lose his Parliamentary seat in a general election, according to polling by Savanta that puts the opposition Labour Party 20 points ahead of the prime minister’s ruling Conservatives.
Labour would romp to a 314-seat majority if an election were held tomorrow, Savanta said in a statement on Tuesday that put Keir Starmer’s party on 48 per cent, with the Tories on 28 per cent.
The Conservatives would lose almost 300 seats, including Mr Sunak’s constituency in Yorkshire and all other seats north of Lincolnshire. Savanta interviewed 6,237 British adults between Dec 2 and Dec 5.
The survey is the latest in a string of polls giving Labour a wide lead over Conservative, and will add to the sense that Mr Sunak faces a struggle to repair the fortunes of the ruling party ahead of a general election that must be held by January 2025.
The Tory brand has been badly damaged this year as MPs ousted two prime ministers, including Mr Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, who crashed the pound and roiled the bond markets during a disastrous seven weeks in office.
A separate survey of 1,088 people by Deltapoll on Tuesday put Labour on 45 per cent and the Tories on 32 per cent.
The Savanta results reflects “two parties experiencing widely differing electoral fortunes,” Mr Chris Hopkins, Political Research Director at Savanta, said in the statement. But with some of the projections indicating marginal results, “it does show that if Rishi Sunak can keep narrowing that Labour lead, point-by-point, the actual results come 2024 could look very different to this nowcast model”.
The Tories won 365 seats in the 2019 general election, and now hold 356 as a result of suspensions and by-election losses. Under the latest poll, they would win just 69, compared to 482 for Labour. Savanta said the Scottish National Party would win 55, with the Liberal Democrats on 21.
Savanta’s data were subject to so-called multi-regression and post-stratification (MRP) modelling by Electoral Calculus. MRP polling is a relatively recent technique that aims to give a more detailed prediction than a standard opinion poll. BLOOMBERG
