Tactical voting will be the KEY as Tories face extinction level event – analysis by Christopher Hope
PA
Tactical voting is likely to be a big deal at this election, writes Hope
Well! The Tories might as well pack up now if the result forecast by the first MRP mega poll of the General Election is anything to go by.
The exclusive survey by Electoral Calculus lays bare the risk that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has taken with his party's MPs by choosing to go to the country six months before he realistically had to.
The result of the poll - published exclusively tonight by GB News and the Daily Mail - is a devastating read for the Conservatives.
The scale of the work involved - 10,000 people interviewed from Monday, May 20, two days before Sunak called the election to May 27 - means Sunak and his team cannot easily brush it one side.
MRP stands for Multi-Level Regression and Poststratification, a type of detailed polling which has been used successfully to predict the results of the past two UK General Elections.
The central headline supports current polling with the Tories on 19 per cent and Labour on 46 per cent. The forecast result is arresting: Labour is on course for a majority of as much as 336.
The Tories are set to lose most of the seats the party won in 2019, to well below 100 MPs in the next Parliament.
Electoral Calculus found that tactical voting is likely to be a big deal at this election, with roughly half of Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters are likely to vote for the leading anti-Tory party if their favourite party is unlikely to win the seat.
Electoral Calculus forecast in the poll that Labour will win either 493 MPs (with no tactical voting) or 476 MPs (with tactical voting) when counting starts on July 5.
The corresponding figures for the Conservatives are 72 and 66. This is a threat to the party's very existence - no political party has a right to exist.
The party would only just have more MPs than the Liberal Democrats, who will see a huge increase in their MPs to 39, with no tactical voting, or 59 MPs, with tactical voting, despite winning just 10 per cent of the votes.
Richard Tice's Reform UK party is set to win 12 per cent of the votes - the third biggest national vote share - and yet be left with not a single MP.
The Tories would still be the official Opposition in the next Parliament - but only just, with fewer than half the remaining 157 MPs in the Commons who are not part of the Labour Party.
The forecast Labour victory would be larger than Tony Blair's landslide in 1997 and be the largest win by any party in modern parliamentary history, except for 1931.
The election on July 4 represents nothing less than an extinction-level event for Sunak and his Conservatives, judging by the MRP poll.
Heads are predicted to roll among Tory big beasts with 18 Cabinet ministers set to be turfed out of office: Oliver Dowden, James Cleverly, Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch, Claire Coutinho, Mel Stride, Gillian Keegan, Mark Harper, David Davies, Victoria Prentis, Esther McVey, Andrew Mitchell and Johnny Mercer all replaced by Labour MPs.
Assuming Sunak quits as leader, Tory Cabinet ministers left after this rout - Jeremy Hunt, Victoria Atkins, Tom Tugendhat, Steve Barclay, Michelle Donelan - will suddenly be seen as front runners to replace him.
The Electoral Calculus poll shows that as things stand Britons want change, and that represents Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour party.
The forecast result is nothing less than a warning for the Tories that they have to go all out to prevent one of the most disastrous election results in British history.
Unless Sunak and his team manage to turn round the polls in the remaining five weeks of this General Election campaign the Conservatives are facing a result which would probably keep them out of power for a generation.
The Tories are about to get steam-rollered by a rampant Labour party, if this poll is anywhere near accurate.