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Patrick O'Flynn 2 March 2024 The Spectator https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-the-tories-avoid-oblivion/
 * Can the Tories avoid oblivion?

Another day, another terrible poll for the Tories – the latest YouGov survey records support for the parties at Labour 46 per cent, Conservative 20 per cent, Reform 14 per cent, Lib Dem 7 per cent, Green 7 per cent. So far, so normal for our beleaguered governing party – even if Reform has nudged up another point to its record-ever showing. Six points between the Cons and Reform looks to me like the sort of margin that could be wiped out altogether were Nigel Farage to take the helm of the challenger party.

The Labour lead and vote share is so commanding that the current response of many Tory MPs – just to grimly await a career-terminating encounter with the British electorate and to start ‘putting out feelers’ for alternative employment – would seem quite logical. However, if you dig down into the tables of data, there is another reading of this poll. If you keep in those people who told YouGov they didn’t know who they’d vote for, or who said they wouldn’t vote, or refused to answer, you see the following raw percentages: Labour 32 per cent, Conservative 14 per cent, Reform 10 per cent, Lib Dem 5 per cent, Green 5 per cent, SNP 2 per cent, ‘Other’ 1 per cent, ‘Won’t vote‘ 12 per cent, ‘Don’t know’ 17 per cent, ‘Refuse to say’ 3 per cent.

This yields two instant surprises. First, Labour’s score is low. Secondly, that the Tory percentage score and lead over Reform is even more parlous than the published adjusted figures would have led one to expect. To me, the raw data seems consistent with another hypothesis: Labour really hasn’t sealed the deal with the electorate, and the vast majority of voters potentially available to the Tories but not currently in their column are to be found on their right flank.

It is thought by many pollsters that the relatively high combined figure for don’t knows and won’t votes in the electorate at the moment is likely to contain a disproportionate number of 2019 Tory voters. If Labour and the other left-wing parties have failed to draw in such voters by now, after all the travails of the government, it must be fairly unlikely they will succeed in doing so before polling day. And it seems equally unlikely that these voters are currently estranged from the Tories because they consider Rishi Sunak too right-wing.

It’s far more likely that Sunak has disappointed them by being too centrist – failing to grasp the negative impacts of international human rights and asylum regimes, and the rise of the kind of ‘hate marches’ Suella Braverman warned about. Sacking Braverman and bringing David Cameron and a phalanx of his acolytes into the cabinet sent out another unappealing signal to alienated right-wing voters. And so did withdrawing the party whip from Lee Anderson a week or so ago.

Other opinion research tells us that excessive immigration of all kinds is rated one of the top political issues by 2019 Tory voters and yet Sunak has shredded his credibility in this area by presiding over even greater volumes than Boris Johnson did before him. If we also take the view that the Reform score, while impressive, remains for now soft and tentative – something giving added credence by it flopping in the Rochdale by-election – then does this not point to there still being a pathway to a very competitive election showing available to the Conservatives?

To take it they would need to be led into the election by someone with credibility in the eyes of right-wing voters. By taking a strategic decision to lurch in a centrist direction after his poor party conference performance, Sunak ruled himself out of being such a leader. But other candidates are available. The polling data does point to the Tories marching to a landslide defeat. It also hints that things need not turn out that way.