Rishi Sunak is forecast to become the first sitting British prime minister to lose their own parliamentary seat at an election, a Savanta opinion poll published by the Telegraph newspaper ahead of the July 4 national vote showed.
Savanta polled around 18,000 people between June 7 and June 18.
The polling showed Sunak’s Conservatives on track to be left with just 53 seats in Britain’s 650-member House of Commons, with the opposition Labour Party forecast to win 516.
Most opinion polls currently place Keir Starmer’s Labour about 20 percentage points ahead of the governing Conservatives in the national vote share.
Despite forecasting Sunak would lose his parliamentary constituency in northern England, once considered a safe Conservative seat, Savanta said the contest was still in the balance given the close margins, the Telegraph reported.
More than 100 such seats are predicted by Savanta to be won by such narrow margins that they remain up for grabs, it said.
A separate poll shows Labour likely to win 406 seats, almost doubling their tally from 2019, while the Tory count is projected to drop to 155 seats, according to the seat-by-seat analysis by More in Common for the News Agents podcast.
While the survey projects a smaller Labour majority than other recent so-called multi-regression and post-stratification (MRP) modelling, such a result would still mean a 162-seat majority – more than double that secured five years ago by former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson and approaching Labour’s best-ever election result, the 179-seat majority secured in 1997 by Tony Blair.
“The fact that this projection showing the Conservatives barely holding 150 seats is one of the most favourable to the Conservatives shows how deep a hole the party finds itself in – with barely two weeks to go for them to change the dial,” More in Common Director Luke Tryl said in a statement.
The survey did not project any seat wins for Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which has recently overtaken the Tories in at least one national poll. A long fieldwork period may not have captured Reform’s recent rise in the polls, Tryl said on the social media platform X.
Separately, a constituency poll by Survation in Clacton, where Farage is standing as a candidate, showed him easily winning the seat with 42 per cent of the vote, compared with 27 per cent for the Tory incumbent, Giles Watling.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
