Rishi Sunak would lose seat and Labour set for 314-seat majority, shock polling finds

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party is on course to win a 314-seat majority at the next general election, according to a shock new polling and seat forecasting.

Labour are predicted to take 482 seats and Conservatives set to win just 69, the major study by Savanta and Electoral Calculus has found.

The Tories would lose all seats north of Lincolnshire – including Rishi Sunak’s Richmond constituency – if current polling was replicated at the election, their worst results in a century.

Labour is up three on 48 per cent, the Tories down five on 28 per cent, and the Lib Dems up one at 11 per cent, the latest Savanta voting intention survey found.

It would mean the Tories facing an almost total wipe out in “red wall” seats in the north of England and Midlands, while losing plenty of “blue wall” seats in the south to the Lib Dems, according to detailed analysis of the findings.

Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta, said it was a marked shift since the last multi-regression and poststratification (MRP) analysis predicted a 56-seat majority for Labour in September.

The economic fall-out from Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget has boosted Labour poll leads since then, with polling experts saying a slight “Sunak bounce” seen in November had largely flatlined.

“Even the most optimistic Labour supporter would not have foreseen what was to come, such was the subsequent Conservative collapse, and therefore this latest MRP model reflects the position now, of two parties experiencing widely differing electoral fortunes,” said Mr Hopkins.

He added: “But we must still express caution. Many seats going to Labour in this model, including a few that could be deemed ‘red wall’, still indicate a 40% or higher chance of remaining Conservative.”

The Savanta expert said that while that would have little impact on the overall election result, it show that if Mr Sunak can keep narrowing that Labour lead “the actual results come 2024 could look very different to this nowcast model”.

It comes as former Labour cabinet minister Ed Balls warned Sir Keir against any “complacency” as Labour continues to enjoy huge poll leads.

“In that period, 1995 to 96, 97, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, they never really believed Labour was going to win,” he told Times Radio on Tuesday.

“They were never complacent about that. Because of course, they’d lived through the run-up to the 1992 election when Neil Kinnock was the leader and people thought Labour would win because the economy was having a big recession.”

Mr Balls said there was a “temptation” to rush out a complete economic plan far in advance of the election. “You have to be really careful that you think that everything you say you know will still be the right thing to have said, in one and a half, two years time.”