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Labour is heading for the biggest “landslide majority” Britain has ever seen, according to one of Rishi Sunak’s ministerial allies, as senior Conservatives in effect conceded defeat ahead of Thursday’s general election.
Mel Stride, work and pensions secretary, said: “I totally accept that where the polls are at the moment means that tomorrow is likely to see the largest Labour landslide majority that this country has ever seen.”
In another sign of impending electoral doom for Sunak, Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper switched its support to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, saying Britain needed “a new manager”.
“By dragging his party back to the centre ground of British politics for the first time since Tony Blair was in No 10, Sir Keir has won the right to take charge,” it said, adding that “the Tories are exhausted”.
Stride’s warning on Wednesday of a big majority for Labour is seen as an attempt to persuade some wavering Tory voters to stick with Sunak’s party, or possibly convince Labour supporters they need not bother to cast a ballot.
“It’s really voter suppression,” said Starmer, on a final day of campaigning that saw him visit Wales, Scotland and England. He said Stride was “trying to get people to stay home rather than go out and vote”.
Speaking in Carmarthenshire, Starmer added: “If you want change you have to vote for it. I know there are very close constituencies across the country, I don’t take anything for granted.”
Sunak, speaking on ITV’s This Morning, seemed to contradict his own minister. “I’m fighting hard for every vote,” he said. “Everyone watching who thinks, ‘Oh, this is all a foregone conclusion’, it’s not.”
Sunak’s cause was not helped on Wednesday when Suella Braverman, former home secretary, wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the election was already “over” and that the prime minister was largely to blame.
The Conservatives recently switched their campaign strategy to warning of a Labour “supermajority”, but the message has failed to cut through with the vast majority of Tory voters and damped party activists’ morale.
Polling by Ipsos and the Financial Times published on Tuesday showed that only a quarter of voters who said they were backing the Conservative party were doing so to prevent Labour winning a large majority.
The collapse of the Tory vote across the country means there are roughly 120 seats where the margin of victory is expected to be fewer than 5 percentage points, according to the FT projection model.
A handful of voters will therefore shape whether the Tories win as many as 146 seats in parliament — or as few as 44. The FT’s election polltracker gives Labour an average 19.5 point lead over the Conservatives.
At a rally on Tuesday night, former prime minister Boris Johnson made a last-minute intervention in the campaign and urged wavering Tory voters to stick with the party rather than allow Labour to enjoy a “sledgehammer majority”.
“We cannot just sit back as a Labour government prepares to use a sledgehammer majority to destroy so much of what we achieved,” he said.
Starmer said on Wednesday he was “not worried in the slightest” about Johnson’s appearance, claiming he was “exhibit A” for his argument that the Tories had presided over 14 years of chaos.
“Having argued for six weeks that they’re chaotic and divided, to bring out . . . exhibit A with 24 hours to go just vindicated the argument I’ve been making,” Starmer said.
Johnson was ousted as prime minister by his own MPs after a turbulent period involving multiple scandals culminating in illegal parties in Downing Street during Covid lockdowns
On Tuesday night, Johnson also launched an attack on Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage. Referring to Farage’s claim that the west had “provoked” Russian President Vladimir Putin into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Johnson said other parties were “full of Kremlin crawlers who actually make excuses for Putin’s 2022 invasion”.
Reform is expected to split the rightwing vote and could cost the Tories dozens of seats, according to analysis of polling data. But the populist party’s campaign has been beset by controversy after activists and candidates were reported making racist, homophobic and sexist remarks.
