Michael Gove warns by-elections will be difficult

Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives will be in “deep electoral trouble” if they lose all three of tomorrow’s by-elections, according to a leading pollster.

Professor Sir John Curtice said it is impossible to predict the outcomes of the crunch votes in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Selby and Ainsty, and Somerton and Frome.

But he warned if the Tories, who are double digits behind Labour in national polls, are defeated in all three seats it will suggest they are in “deep electoral trouble”.

The polling guru said it would be comparable to the Tories in 1997 ahead of Labour’s landslide general election victory.

However, he cautioned that “history is never guaranteed to repeat itself”.

Prof Sir John told the Express: “By-elections predict no more than opinion polls do at this point in time. What they can help give an indication of is where we’re at at the moment.

READ MORE: By-election battlegrounds – Your guide to the 3 crunch Tory seats up for grabs

“So it’s perfectly clear for example the three by-elections that have happened since Liz Truss’s demise are consistent with the evidence of the opinion polls that the Labour Party is much more popular relative to the Conservatives now than it was an any previous point in this Parliament.

“If the Tories lose all three seats it will confirm that indeed the Tories are at the moment in deep electoral trouble.

“We can point to the fact that the last time the Tories were this behind in the polls and the last time that the Tories suffered swings of the kind that would be required to lose, particularly Selby, is before the 1997 general election.

“So we can certainly say that precedent suggests that the Tories have a very difficult situation to recover from that but history is never guaranteed to repeat itself.”

Prof Sir John said the best-case scenario for the Tories in the ballots is likely to be losing just one seat.

He said: “I think three Tory holds would be improbable. Only one loss is perhaps the best they could reasonably hope for and given the expectations that have been generated, people will go well maybe the Tories can recover anyway, which it may or may not necessarily tell you that.

“It could be three Tory losses but there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be three Tory losses.

“We’ve had absolutely no polling in Somerton and Frome. We had two polls done in Uxbridge and in Selby but now at least two weeks ago.

“So in terms of actual hard, verifiable public information coming from the constituencies themselves, we know virtually nothing.”

Prof Sir John said Labour “ought” to win Boris Johnson’s old seat in west London but highlighted fury at Sadiq Khan’s expansion of the ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ).

He said: “The 7.5 percent swing that’s required in Uxbridge is only half the swing from Conservative to Labour currently being registered by the opinion polls.

“It is also somewhat less than the swing that Labour got in the three by-elections since the demise of Liz Truss. All of those were in safe Labour seats which would therefore mean to swing was probably lower than you would have got elsewhere.

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“Frankly Uxbridge ought to go Labour. Of course, there’s the row about ULEZ but even so given the national polls Uxbridge I would have said is something that Labour ought to win.”

Prof Sir John said the Tories could narrowly hang on to Selby and Ainsty in North Yorkshire, which is vacant after Nigel Adams quit after failing to get a peerage in Mr Johnson’s resignation honours list.

He said: “Selby requires somewhat more than the national swing, it requires about an 18 percent swing. We do sometimes get swings well above the national polls in by-elections and we did have three by-elections before 1997 that Labour picked up on a swing of more than 20 percent.

“But it is a pretty safe Tory seat. I think Labour has never managed to gain a seat from the Tories in a by-election starting from so far behind.

“But the national swing is 15 percent. The Tory position has weakened since the middle of June since the Boris Johnson Privileges Committee report and the failure of the Conservative Party to distance itself from Johnson.

“The one poll we had, for what it’s worth, showed a substantial collapse in the Tory vote. So Selby I would imagine will be at best a close Tory win and it may well be the Tories hang onto it.

“Frankly even the Tories only hang on to it narrowly it won’t necessarily tell you that it’s some disaster for Labour.”

In Somerton and Frome, the Liberal Democrats are pulling out all the stops to overturn a 20,000 majority after David Warburton quit following an admission of cocaine use.

Prof Sir John said: “Somerton and Frome all we are really guessing is that one this is an area with a long-running Liberal Democrat slash liberal vote.

“The Liberal Democrats managed to hang onto albeit very narrowly between 1997 and 2010.

“We’ve seen what’s happen in other by-elections and obviously the one closest to this was the Tiverton one in this Parliament where the Liberal Democrats are the obvious challenges and we’re going well given what happened in Tiverton and given what happened in North Shropshire maybe the Lib Dems will get it.

“But no guarantees. It’s never ever been more than a very marginal Lib Dem seat and the Lib Dems are still not doing very much in the national opinion polls.”

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