There was a significant decline in the fortunes of the Conservative Party ahead of the next general election.
In April 2020, the Conservatives had a 21 point lead over Labor in a YouGov poll. Fast forward to today and Labor has completely flipped the script and is now 22 points ahead of the Conservatives.
Everything points to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labor Party forming Britain’s next government, with Rishi Sunak saying he plans to call the next general election in the second half of this year.
Here, Yahoo News UK looks at how the polls are changing, what’s behind it and the latest odds.
What do public opinion polls say?
YouGov’s voting intention tracker (see the table belowThe survey, which has been surveying voters regularly since January 2020, shows how much support for the Conservative Party has collapsed and how much support for Labor has increased.
Labour’s lead in the polls continues in the latest poll released today, revealing a pessimistic result for Rishi Sunak.
The latest data, covering January 2-3, puts the Conservatives on 22 per cent, Labor on 46 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 10 per cent, the SNP on 3 per cent, Plaid Cymru on 1 per cent, Reform UK on 9 per cent and the Greens on 9 per cent. is showing. %at 7.
While the performance of Reform UK (currently polling almost as high as the Liberal Democrats, and sometimes polling even higher) is certainly remarkable, it is the contrasting fortunes of Labor and the Conservative Party that have characterized the last four years.
What are the latest rates?
Oddschecker, a website that compares odds from different bookmakers, showed that as of January 8 Labor had won the most seats with 2/17. This means a £10 punt would return just £11.18.
The Conservatives won the most seats with 13/2. Punters see this as so unlikely that a £10 bet at these odds would return £75.
What went wrong for the Conservatives?
So why have the polls changed so dramatically? It is worth looking back at what has been an extremely eventful four years in UK politics.
The Conservative Party’s support reached 53% (Labour’s 32%) in April 2020, months after the party’s stunning success in the 2019 general election and Boris Johnson making good on his promise to “get Brexit done”.
This was also the period when the spirit of national unity emerged at the height of the Covid epidemic and the emergence of a deadly virus that nearly killed Johnson. The then Prime Minister was discharged from the hospital five days before this survey was conducted.
The rest of the year saw a decline in support amid the chaos surrounding COVID rules, with the Conservatives falling as low as 35% in November 2020, while Labor fell to 40%.
However, the UK’s successful Covid vaccination program has provided a way out of lockdown, and poll scores have improved along with it. The Conservative Party’s support reached 41% in June 2021, and Labor’s support reached 30%. By October of that year there was a sense that Johnson was untouchable. At the Conservative Party conference, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg noted how the Prime Minister “has complete control of his party and is politically dominant in the country”.
However, this quickly came to an end with the Partygate scandal that emerged in November of the same year. Reports have repeatedly emerged of government and Conservative Party staffers (including Johnson) attending social gatherings during the lockdown period when their own COVID rules banned them. As of January 2022, the Conservative Party’s support has fallen to 28% and the Labor Party’s support has fallen to 38%. Johnson struggled but could not recover, and a wave of ministerial resignations forced him to resign in July of that year.
His successor, Liz Truss, ushered in arguably the most disastrous reign as prime minister in history, characterized by a disastrous “mini-budget” that included £45bn of unfunded tax cuts, leading to an economic crisis. Like Johnson, he lost the trust of Conservative MPs and voters and was forced to resign. His 49-day period as Prime Minister was the shortest in history; The Conservative Party’s support fell to 19% (Labour’s 56%) the day after he announced his resignation in October 2022.
Rishi Sunak, who lost to Truss in last month’s Tory leadership election, took over. But as the YouGov chart above shows, he failed to win over voters. The Conservative Party’s support was at 23% two days after he took office; The most recent survey, conducted last month, shows that this rate has fallen to 22%.
In short, the polls, along with other factors such as the by-election victories of Starmer’s Labor Party last year, point to a Labor government.