Oblivion: Election Would See Tories Come Third With Sunak, Boris, Truss Losing Own Seats

Tories
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Jack Montgomery

A snap general election would see Britain’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party sink to third place in Parliament and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and predecessors Liz Truss and Boris Johnson kicked out of parliament, polls suggest.

While the Tories have placed first in the last four general elections, winning their biggest parliamentary majority since the 1980s under Boris Johnson in 2019, polling conducted by Find Out Now and Electoral Calculus for The Daily Telegraph suggests the British public’s patience has snapped, with Prime Minister Sunak — elevated to the country’s highest office with no mandate from the electorate or even his own party members — facing a crushing defeat and the loss of his own seat in the House of Commons.

Liz Truss, who defeated Sunak in a leadership contest last year but was soon ousted and replaced with him by party politicians regardless, without regular party members being able to vote against him a second time, is also projected to lose her seat, along with Boris Johnson and 14 members of the Cabinet besides the Prime Minister himself.

All told, the polling indicates that the Tories would collapse to just 45 seats — a loss of 320 — and sink to third place behind the left-separatist Scottish National Party (SNP), which with 50 Members of Parliament (MPs) would become the official Opposition in the House of Commons despite the fact that it does not even stand for elections outside Scotland.

The Tories’ pitch to the British people and, in particular, conservative and right-leaning voters has become increasingly unclear in recent years.

Election pledges to reduce immigration from “the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” and then, more vaguely, to reduce immigration “overall”, have not only been repeatedly broken — deliberately, according to George Osborne, with top Tories supporting mass immigration in private — legal immigration has actually been intentionally increased to record levels.

Indeed, Sunak recently signalled in a speech to corporate bigwigs that he believes he can get away with doing nothing about rising legal immigration as long as he is seen to be doing something about illegal immigration — but that is also substantially and dramatically worsening, with the authorities not only continuing to face issues with tens of thousands of visa overstayers and deportations of foreign criminals collapsing, but the embarrassing and highly visible spectacle of boat migrants crossing the English Channel by the tens of thousands annually, with the Border Force actively assisting them rather than turning them back.

The Conservatives are also clearly no longer the party of low taxes, with the tax burden being increased to its heaviest since the Second World War, or general administrative competence, having now acquired a long record of scandals with respect to its handling of coronavirus testing, lockdowns, and more.

One of the few areas where it has appeared to deliver a traditionally conservative or, more accurately, market liberal programme is “fiscal discipline”, with huge cuts to the armed forces and police forces, many courtrooms closed, and so on — but wasteful spending of diversity, inclusions, and equality initiatives and the green agenda has continued largely unabated, giving the impression that “discipline” has only really been applied to institutions its voters tends to support.

The party’s major pitch to voters in recent years, with the Brexit it has failed to meaningfully deliver being more or less off the political agenda, was that it was not Labour, and in particular not Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, an old-fashioned state socialist with a very chequered history.

Under the more quietly radical Sir Keir Starmer, however, Labour is proving to be a less effective bogeyman — and with the sleaze, pointless wars, and open borders of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown administrations increasingly remote, “at least we’re not Labour” may no longer be a sufficient selling point for a Conservative Party which has delivered the opposite of what it has promised on Brexit, immigration, and taxes anyway.

The Reform Party, formerly the Brexit Party, has also been clear that it will not step aside for the Tories in right-leaning parliamentary constituencies as it did in 2019 to help deliver a parliamentary majority for Brexit, with its share of the electorate expected to be taken largely from disillusioned Tory voters.

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