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Labour is heading for the biggest “landslide majority” Britain has ever seen, according to one of Rishi Sunak’s closest ministerial allies, as he 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.”
Stride’s warning of a big majority for Labour and Sir Keir Starmer is a bid to persuade some wavering Conservative voters to stick with Sunak’s party.
He said it was “highly unlikely” the polls were wrong. “What matters now is what kind of opposition do we have, and what kind of ability to scrutinise the government is there within parliament,” he told the BBC’s Today programme on Wednesday.
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 has 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.
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 the pandemic.
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.
In the past week, two of Reform’s candidates have suspended their campaigns and defected to the Tories after Farage’s party became engulfed in scandal.
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