A cabinet minister has said Labour is heading for the biggest general election landslide in history, effectively throwing in the towel before polls have even opened.
In an extraordinary admission on the eve of polling day, work and pensions secretary Mel Stride said Sir Keir Starmer is on course to win more seats than Sir Tony Blair in 1997.
And, far from pitching the Conservatives as a party that can win, he said people should back the Tories as an opposition force “so we can hold this government to account going forward”.
Polls suggest Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is set for a historic victory in Thursday’s general election, with forecasts suggesting it will win more seats than during Sir Tony’s 1997 landslide.
In one of the last major polls of the campaign, election experts at Survation said there was a 99 per cent chance the party will take more than 418 seats, the number it achieved 27 years ago.
Election experts at Survation said it was almost certain the party would take more than 418 seats, the number won by Sir Tony 27 years ago
And, speaking to Times Radio, Mr Stride, who has been one of Rishi Sunak’s most loyal lieutenants during the election campaign, said: “Unless it's an extraordinary upset, which is highly unlikely, you're going to get a Labour government, you're going to get the change.”
He added: “We're not only going to get a Labour government, we're going to get a kind of supermajority, which is going to be this country with effectively a government that is not being held to account because the opposition is too small, too marginalised, too weak. And what we have to have is some balance within our parliament. And I think that is genuinely what is in play now.”
His comments come a day after a major poll gave Labour a 99 per cent chance of exceeding Sir Tony Blair’s 1997 election win.
It came as Suella Braverman urged the Conservative Party to “read the writing on the wall” and “prepare for the reality and frustration of opposition”.
A day before the general election, the former home secretary declared “it’s over” for the Tories and urged the party to conduct “a searingly honest post-match analysis” after its widely expected defeat.
The two senior Tories admitting defeat came just hours after Mr Sunak and Boris Johnson appeared alongside each other at a rally for the Conservative faithful. Mr Sunak hailed the “united Conservative Party” and insisted that the election result was “not a foregone conclusion”.
Meanwhile Mr Johnson railed against Sir Keir’s Labour Party, warning it would “use a sledgehammer majority to destroy so much of what we have achieved”.
But, writing in The Telegraph, Ms Braverman said victory should no longer be the goal for the Tories.
“Thursday’s vote is now all about forming a strong enough opposition,” she wrote. “One needs to read the writing on the wall: it’s over, and we need to prepare for the reality and frustration of opposition.”
Ms Braverman blamed the situation on a fracture within the Conservative Party resulting from a rise in Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
She said: “It is notable that Labour’s vote share has not markedly increased in recent weeks, but our vote is evaporating from both Left and Right.
“The critics will cite Boris (Johnson), Liz (Truss), Rwanda, and, I can immodestly predict, even me as all being fatal to our ‘centrist’ vote.
“The reality is rather different: we are haemorrhaging votes largely to Reform. Why? Because we failed to cut immigration or tax or deal with the net zero and woke policies we have presided over for 14 years.
“We may lose hundreds of excellent MPs because of our abject inability to have foreseen this inevitability months ago: that our failure to unite the Right would destroy us.”
Ms Braverman said the Tories need “a searingly honest post-match analysis”, “because the fight for the soul of the Conservative Party will determine whether we allow Starmer a clear run at destroying our country for good or having a chance to redeem it in due course.
“Indeed, it will decide whether our party continues to exist at all.”
The article will be seen as a premature pitch for the Tory leadership by Ms Braverman, positioning herself to be the champion of the party’s right wing after the election. She is likely to come up against business secretary Kemi Badenoch, among others, depending on which Tory big beasts manage to keep their seats on Thursday night.
Meanwhile Ms Badenoch’s camp has been hit by fears that delays sending out postal votes in her constituency could delay any potential bid for the Tory leadership.
Councils across the country are scrambling to ensure postal votes are delivered and returned on time amid concerns that some people could be left disenfranchised at the general election.
In Ms Badenoch’s North West Essex constituency, more than 2,600 postal ballots were not sent in time, leading to fears Labour could be entitled to challenge the result if she wins by a small margin.
That would force an immediate by-election, during which time Ms Badenoch would be ineligible to stand for the Tory leadership, The Times reported.
In her Telegraph article, Ms Braverman also lashed out at the Conservative Party for being willing to “fill our coffers” with money from Frank Hester after the Tory donor apologised for saying Diane Abbott “makes you want to hate all Black women” and “should be shot”.
She said Mr Sunak was right to call out racism exposed by Reform candidates, but “cries of hurt and anger look less powerful when the Conservative Party was perfectly happy to take the money from Frank Hester”.
She added: “Remarks about hating black women were glossed over in the name of filling our party coffers. I don’t follow the logic. Nor do the voters. Whatever ‘the smartest men in the room’ might privately think, the public are not in fact mugs.”
This article was written by Archie Mitchell from The Independent and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.
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