THE TORIES face being wiped out in next month’s elections, according to a damning new poll that will add to the pressure on Theresa May.
Incredibly, not only will Tory voters turn against the party but so too will Tory politicians.
A staggering 40% of May’s councillors have said they will vote for Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party in the European elections. According to the Survation poll for The Mail on Sunday, just 52% of Tory councillors said they would vote for their own party.
One told the polling firm: “The Conservative Party is dead. It will take a strong leader to dredge it out of the mud.” Another said: “For God’s sake get on with it [Brexit] – it is killing us on the doorstep.” The Tory group on Derbyshire County Council has even gone on “strike,” refusing to take part in the campaign.
A separate poll of party members, carried out for the Conservative Home website, suggested three out of five card-carrying Tories would vote for Farage.
The site suggested this was in part down to sheer anger over the postponement of Brexit and at May’s talks with Jeremy Corbyn.
But it also claimed this could be down to the belief that “a really bad result might prove to be a trigger for leadership change.”
According to reports over the weekend, there’s likely to be a fresh push among Tory backbenchers to try and change party rules so that MPs can turf May out of office. The Sunday Times yesterday reported that Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 committee, is set to visit May to tell her that 70% of her MPs now want her to resign.
A previously loyal minister told the paper: “She has to go. She is a calamity.” A senior MP added: “The pressure is building and will be irresistible if we perform badly in the local elections.”
The Prime Minister won a no-confidence vote last December, and, under Tory party standing orders, can now not be challenged until December this year.
The leadership of the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs are due to meet when Parliament returns from Easter recess on Tuesday to discuss overturning that rule. Party insiders say they could give her until June 30 before deciding.
It’s not just the European elections where the Tories could get a doing. On May 2, voters in 248 English local councils will go to the polls to elect 8773 councillors and six directly elected mayors.
Election experts Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher have predicted that May’s party are on course to lose between 500 and 1000 seats.
That’s despite Farage’s party not standing, Rallings and Thraser said: “a six-point swing to Labour, implied by polling putting the Tories on 28% and Labour on 36%, could yield more than 1,000 Tory losses and 800 Labour gains. Not as crushing as the 2,000 seats lost to Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1995, but sufficient to put huge pressure on the leadership.”
The Survation poll also shows that if Boris Johnson was Tory leader for the elections, the number of defectors to the Brexit Party would nearly halve.
Out of those Tory councillors who said they were certain to vote in the elections, the number voting Tory would rise to 65% if Johnson became Prime Minister, with 22% backing Farage.
Farage launched his Brexit Party earlier this month. One poll last week put it one 27%, ahead of both Labour, on 22% and the Tories on 15%,
The new party is estimated to have already received more than £1.5 million in donations.
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