Is Rishi Sunak staring at a crushing electoral loss in the UK?

British prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is poised for the worst defeat in the upcoming national election, according to a new survey released on Wednesday.

As per the survey, the main Opposition, the Labour Party, is winning more than 400 seats and the Conservatives will win slightly more than 150 seats in the United Kingdom’s 650-seat parliament.

The findings indicate a worse defeat for the Tories than under former Tory prime minister John Major in 1997 when the Tony Blair-led Labour left them with just 165 MPs. The Conservatives have been in power since 2010, but there have been five different prime ministers due to various controversies.

Let’s have a closer look at what the survey says.

The survey

The YouGov model, which forecasts results in individual parliamentary seats based on estimated vote share, predicted that Sunak’s Conservatives would win only 155 seats and Labour would win 403. Polls consistently show Labour leading by double digits over the Conservatives, with Sunak predicting an election in the second half of the year.

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“These latest results push Keir Starmer closer toward repeating a Blair-level result for Labour, a full 27 years since Labour’s longest-serving prime minister first took office. In that election, Blair won 418 out of the available 659 House of Commons seats,” reads the YouGov analysis.

“By contrast, Rishi Sunak is now heading for a worse result than John Major’s 1997 total of 165 seats. The coming tidal wave projected by this model would sweep away several major Conservative figures,” it said.

YouGov interviewed at least 18,761 British adults between 7 March and 27 March for the survey. According to YouGov, the headline election result based on the model would be Labour with 41 per cent and Conservatives with 24 per cent, though the results may differ from regular polling due to its treatment of those who do not currently intend to vote.

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Key members face uncertain fate

The most prominent members of parliament who could lose their House of Commons seat include Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Science Minister Michelle Donelan and Levelling-up Minister Michael Gove. Other senior Tories in the precarious zone include Commons leader Penny Mordaunt and former minister Jacob Rees-Mogg.

The Liberal Democrats are up by one seat based on an earlier YouGov model, to 49, on the path to a “significant parliamentary comeback” without any significant changes to their national vote share. In Scotland, YouGov now projects Labour to comfortably be the largest party.

The headline results based on this MRP model would be Labour at 41 per cent of the vote, the Conservatives at 24 per cent, the Liberal Democrats at 12 per cent, the Greens at seven per cent, far-right Reform UK at 12 per cent, and others at one per cent.

“Constituency-level projections were estimated using the same statistical method which correctly predicted the 2017 and 2019 UK general elections — multi-level modelling and post-stratification (MRP),” it said.

The repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act in 2022 restored the ability of British prime ministers to set election dates. However, by law a general election has to take place at least every five years, making January 2025 the outermost deadline for Sunak to go to the ballot box.

Rishi Sunak’s declining popularity

The Conservatives have been embroiled in a number of controversies, including Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and a scandal over the handling of the COVID crisis, which has resulted in continued political turmoil. The Sunak-led party has lost 10 by-elections since the last general election, the most of any administration since the 1960s. That includes six defeats and one victory since Sunak took office in October 2022.

The 43-year-old British prime minister has struggled to restore his party’s dwindling popularity despite rebranding himself as a bold reformer several times over the last year, and he is under pressure from members of his own party to offer a more right-wing conservative agenda before the election. Sunak is struggling to keep his election promises, including a pledge to expand the economy and end the cost-of-living crisis.

The increasingly beleaguered prime minister tries to stave off internal strife, with right-wing members of the ruling Conservative Party calling for a leadership change ahead of a general election later this year. With the Spring Budget earlier this month failing to turn the tide in the party’s favour and a series of high-profile departures from the Tory ranks, there is growing discontent among Conservative backbenchers.

The poll indicated that Sunak is still struggling to gain traction following a tax-cutting budget last month and ahead of local elections in May. According to the YouGov poll, a group of Tory MPs want to replace Sunak with his former leadership rival and current Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, who is set to lose her seat.

With inputs from agencies