Farage poll shock! Cue Tories in full headless chicken mode…

Trying to assess the mood inside Conservative HQ is hard. There are a lot of stiff upper lips about. Richard Holden, the party chair, is popular with officials that I have spoken to. He works incredibly hard, and gets “stuck in” with junior staff, they say.

They don’t hold against him the “stitch-up” in Basildon and Billericay, by which he was parachuted in with 48 hours to spare before tomorrow’s deadline for nominations of parliamentary candidates.

But there is a nervousness beneath the surface, and many Tory MPs are blunt in private that they think they are being led by Holden and Rishi Sunak like lambs to the slaughter.

The prime minister’s performance in the TV debate on Tuesday night succeeded in stabilising the incipient panic triggered by Nigel Farage’s arrival on the campaign stage. By exceeding low expectations and forcing Labour to talk about tax, Sunak managed to halt the tide of bad news for the Tories.

But the respite lasted for less than 24 hours, until YouGov published its latest opinion poll on Wednesday at 5.29pm. The polling company had changed its method of estimating parties’ share of the vote, which concealed the significance of the poll. The change in method, designed to bring YouGov’s regular polls more in line with its mega-sample seat-by-seat models, cut Labour’s lead from 27 points to 21 points.

But more significantly, it put the Tories two points ahead of Reform UK, on 19 per cent as against 17 per cent, whereas if YouGov had stuck to its previous method, the two parties would have tied in second place on 18 per cent.

The poll, most of which was carried out after Farage announced that he was standing for parliament and returning to the leadership of Reform, suggests that Reform is poised on the brink of “the crossover” – overtaking the Conservatives as the second most popular party in Britain.

There will inevitably be polls in the next few days, if not hours, putting Reform ahead of the Tories. This could be the moment that panic really sets in at the heart of the Tory campaign. Peter Mandelson mischievously suggested on the Times Radio podcast this week that, even at this late stage, the Tories could ditch Sunak and draft in Penny Mordaunt, the Lord President of the Council, as temporary prime minister and leader of the Tory party.

That is not going to happen, but once Farage can claim to be the main challenger to the Labour Party expect all sorts of wild talk from Tories in full headless chicken mode.

The only question before 4pm on Friday – the deadline for parliamentary nominations – is how many Tory MPs will defect to Reform, now that joining Farage’s outfit could hold out a better prospect of holding their seats than sticking with the Titanic. They have only a few hours to try to negotiate with Farage, to persuade him to let them run as the Reform candidate in their constituency instead of the candidate that Reform has already selected.

It is no wonder that Sunak was so ruthless and cynical in the TV debate, emulating Boris Johnson in his shameless untruths in a desperate attempt to shore up Tory support. Sunak and his advisers must fear that the campaign can keep sliding away from them, because every attempt they have made to halt the slide – including calling the election four months earlier than expected – has failed to stop it.

In the end, the first-past-the-post voting system is likely to deliver 50-100 seats for the Tories almost regardless of how bad it gets, and Reform is unlikely ever to get enough support to win more than a handful of seats.

One Tory candidate who will still be an MP in the new parliament is Richard Holden. The Essex seat where he was on a shortlist of one, and in effect imposed on party members, has a notional 44 per cent majority in 2019 on new boundaries, making it one of the safest Tory berths in the country.

But there is a month of the election campaign to go, and if the Tories slip definitively into third place, he and Sunak will find it hard to escape the blame for the chaos that follows.