UK Labour set for bigger victory than Blair in 1997, poll finds

The YouGov survey predicts Keir Starmer will enter No 10 with 422 MPs, surpassing the number of seats won by Tony Blair in 1997, giving Labor the second largest majority in British political history.

Labour is on track for its biggest election victory, surpassing the number of seats won by Tony Blair in 1997, a poll of more than 50,000 people suggests.

The YouGov survey predicts that Sir Keir Starmer would enter No 10 with 422 MPs, with the Conservatives reduced to 140 seats, compared with the 365 seats they won five years ago.

The analysis also shows that the Conservatives’ fortunes have declined since March, despite a policy blitz designed to close the gap with Labour.

Twelve cabinet ministers are forecast to lose their seats, including Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, and Gillian Keegan, the education secretary.

Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons who with Shapps is seen as a potential leadership contender, is also under threat.

Victoria Prentis, the attorney-general; Johnny Mercer, the minister for veterans’ affairs; Grant Shapps, the defence secretary; Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor; and Penny Mordaunt, leader of the Commons could lose their seats if the poll proves accurate.

Overall the Tories are predicted to hold 15 fewer seats than was forecast in March, and Labour’s majority is expected to increase to 194. In 1997 Tony Blair had a 179-seat majority.

It would be the second largest majority in British political history after Stanley Baldwin won a 209 majority for the Conservatives in the 1924 election.

The survey suggests a bleak set of results for the Tories. Of the 42 seats identified as forming the Red Wall in 2019, all are on course to be won back by Labour. In Ashfield, Normanton & Hemsworth and Ellesmere Port & Bromborough the Conservatives are forecast to be pushed into third place by Reform.

Of the 45 blue wall seats in the south, 19 are likely to go to Labour and 13 to the Lib Dems, with only 13 remaining in Tory hands. The Conservatives are also at risk of being ejected from London. YouGov’s model has the Tories taking four seats, but all four are close contests.

In Scotland the SNP looks set to lose 31 of the 48 seats it won in 2019, which would leave it with only 17 MPs.

In Wales YouGov has Labour winning 28 of the 32 seats.

The Liberal Democrats also look on track to make big gains, with YouGov predicting that the party will gain 40 seats at the expense of the Conservatives to become the third largest party for the first time since 2015.

The poll suggests a bleak set of results for Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative party Rishi Sunak. Picture: AFP

Reform is not predicted to win any seats but YouGov expects it to get about 10 per cent of the national vote, depriving the Tories of victory in some seats.

Overall vote share for the parties is similar to other recent YouGov surveys and has Labour on 43 per cent, the Conservatives on 25 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent. The Greens are predicted to be on 7 per cent.

Anthony Wells, head of political and social research at YouGov, said the poll suggested that voter sentiment was moving against the Tories. “Most conventional wisdom had it that when the general election was called there would be a narrowing of the polling gap between the two main parties,” he said. “But this poll suggests Labour remain on track for a 1997-style landslide.

“Looking across all the polling carried out in the campaign so far, if anything the public have moved further away from the Conservatives.”

The only hope for the Tories in the poll is that, according to YouGov’s model, 131 seats are a toss-up in which the winning party’s lead is fewer than five points. Eighty-seven of these seats are contests between the Conservatives and Labour, with the Tories ahead in 50 of them.

YouGov’s MRP (multi-level regression and post-stratification) model uses a much larger sample of voters than traditional polls and then uses the data to predict at a constituency level the likely outcome of individual contests.

It does this by assessing the concentration of various types of voters in individual seats, including socio-demographic characteristics taken from census data, past voting choices, shares for various parties within each constituency and information about the candidates.

This election is more complicated because it will be the first since boundary changes to constituencies.