The Telegraph’s analysis suggests that increased support for Reform UK would cost the Conservative Party 35 seats at the next election and give Labor a majority.
The right-wing Reform Party, led by Richard Tice, has more than doubled its vote share in recent polls and is poised to inflict fatal damage on Rishi Sunak.
Anger over the Conservatives’ failure to tackle immigration is driving 2019 voters towards Reformation, experts have warned.
Reform polls hover around 10 percent nationwide; This was up from a typical five percentage point a year ago and well above the two percentage points the Brexit Party secured in 2019.
Things will get worse for Mr Sunak if he returns to politics following his role in Nigel Farage’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, given his public name recognition.
Pollsters said Mr Farage was popular with many of the Red Wall voters the Conservative Party appealed to in 2019 and was seen as a “conviction politician”, unlike Mr Sunak or Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer.
During a focus group held by More in Common pollsters in Walsall in the West Midlands last month, voters praised Mr Farage for “speaking sense” on immigration and “saying what we are all thinking”.
Further Joint analysis based on voting intentions shows the Conservatives are on course to win 35 fewer seats than they would have without Reformation. If this had not happened, the Conservatives would have won 265 constituencies in England and Wales, almost certainly depriving Labor of a majority and creating a hung parliament.
But the picture will change dramatically if Reform wins nine per cent of the vote, as predicted in More in Common’s latest poll. The Conservatives’ seat count would then fall to 230, with Sir Keir taking a comfortable lead.
Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, said most of Reform’s new support was made up of Red Wall voters who gave Boris Johnson his overwhelming majority.
He said reasons for the switch included the perception that the Conservatives had “broken their promises” on immigration and that the UK was a “light touch”.
“There is a sense that the Conservative Party is talking a good game but doing nothing about it, and it is this disappointment that you are now seeing driving some Tory 2019 voters into the arms of Reform,” he said.
Mr Tice described the last three weeks, which saw infighting in the Conservative Party over record immigration numbers, as a “turning point”.
He said 1,200 new members signed up to Reform in the five days following Lord Cameron’s appointment as Foreign Secretary and this was “appallingly received” by Conservative voters. “What’s happening here is people are realizing that the Conservative Party doesn’t have the philosophy of conservatism,” he added.
Mr Tice said his party would contest every seat and had no chance of withdrawing candidates to help Tory MPs on the right under threat from Labour.
“They’d be happy to take my phone and talk about running away; that’s the only deal to be made,” he said. “Seismic political change is about to happen in the UK.”
He said his party had achieved its recent success without its founder, Mr Farage, adding that he was unaware of the latest political events because he was in the Australian bush.
“He’s going to be as angry or more angry than anyone else when he finds out everything that happened, and there’s no one more trusted on immigration,” Mr. Tice said. “I’m sure this will have a very heavy impact on his thinking. “As a cumulative force, I think this is a huge, huge opportunity to completely reshape the landscape.”
Pollsters have said that if Mr Farage runs a Reform campaign “all bets are off” and the party could repeat the 14 per cent vote share achieved by the UK Independence Party (Ukip) in 2015.
Common’s analysis shows that if this were to happen, the Conservatives’ seat count would fall to just 200 and Labor would win a huge majority.
YouGov’s director of political and social research, Adam McDonnell, said the Conservatives were unlikely to win back voters who planned to support Reformation.
Judging by Reform’s current polls, this will be a big problem for the Conservatives. “It would be very damaging,” he said. “This could lead to some seats coming into play that were not in play, despite Labour’s big lead, because Reform will take Conservative votes.”
An example of this is North East Somerset, led by Jacob Rees-Mogg; here Ukip came in third place behind Labor with 8.6 per cent of the vote in 2015.
Some experts have argued that support for Reform has been exaggerated, pointing to recent by-elections in which the party underperformed its projected national vote share, but all agree that polls show support for the Right party is increasing.
Scarlett Maguire, a director at pollster JL Partners, said the Conservatives were “increasingly losing voters to Reform”, adding: “You’ve got a situation now where even if they were in every Conservative seat, they wouldn’t be able to do that.” “We need to get a lot of votes to do pretty serious damage to the Conservatives.”
Mr Farage is seen by many voters as a “trustworthy politician”, adding: “If Farage comes back then all bets are off, or rather people will probably start betting that the Conservatives will do much, much worse things.
“The majority of voters have already given up on the Government over the small boat issue, so they will either Reform or they don’t know it in the polls.”