Rishi Sunak: Will he lose his safe Tory seat?
Rishi Sunak: Will he lose his safe Tory seat?
With every bad poll that lands for the Conservatives, the unthinkable becomes more realistic.
BY MICHAEL HAVIS
I’VE been putting it off for a while, but looking at the calendar and seeing how few episodes of Listening to Britain remained before the General Election, I knew that the time had come: I had to visit Rishi Sunak’s constituency.
A rural seat with an affluent population, you might be wondering what the hold up was; certainly I had no reason to be worried about crime or an otherwise hostile reception. The problem was geography: the drive from my house to the closest part of Mr Sunak’s Yorkshire constituency is an eight-hour round trip.
What’s the hurry? Well, unless polling undergoes a massive transformation in the final weeks of the campaign, Mr Sunak is going to lose the general election. From a YouTube perspective, there’s likely to be a lot more interest in what voters from his constituency have to say while he’s Prime Minister, than when he’s a backbench Tory MP in opposition.
But more striking is the fact that he may not even be an MP this time next month. Richmond is a safe Conservative seat, formerly represented by William Hague, the ex-Conservative Party leader trounced by Tony Blair in 2001. Since the end of the Second World War, the Conservative majority here has never slipped below 10,000, with the sole exception of a by-election in 1989 — which the Tories still won.
But right now the numbers aren’t so cosy. I recently saw figures from Electoral Calculus predicting Mr Sunak will retain the seat with a majority of just 3.4%. At time of writing, that number has climbed to 5.8% but it’s still a very small buffer. Survation, meanwhile, predicts Mr Sunak’s winning majority is down to just 3.3%. And New Statesman has it at 4.7%. That’s far too close for comfort.
I can’t find any examples in British history of a sitting Prime Minister losing their seat at a general election. It would be the first time. Could it really happen? And in such a safe seat? I fired up the Nissan and hit the A1 to ask the people who decide: the voters.
Things got off to an alarming start for the Prime Minister. The first three people I spoke to (two of them on-camera) were giving their vote to Reform, Nigel Farage’s party. Two were happy enough with Mr Sunak as a local MP, another less so, but all three were disappointed by his government, and were concerned about immigration.
This happened time and time again. I would be told by voters that they liked the Tory candidate as an MP, that he was responsive to emails, and that he wasn’t a stranger in the constituency, but that they didn’t like his government. The first man I spoke to even said that local people were proud of him being their MP – as if he was a local boy made good, though the man knew this wasn’t the case. Mr Sunak of course is from Southampton, some 235 miles to the south as the crow flies, and a drive of roughly five hours. He’s about as “parachuted” in as an MP can be, but still…
Things gradually warned up for the Tory party as the day wore on, and I started to find blue votes, but not as many as you might expect in a safe seat. One came from an old lady, grateful for the Prime Minister’s pension boost; another was an old man who declined to appear on camera. The third was a woman in her 50s or 60s, out with her husband; she was confident that he too would vote Conservative, but he wasn’t so sure.
I did find Labour support too, however, albeit just the two people. One was a young serviceman who declined to appear on camera because of his job. The other was very much anti-Conservative, and disliked Sunak personally. He felt that the Prime Minister’s D-Day gaffe summed him up. It was one of several times that particular blunder came up.
A number of people said, unprompted, that the Conservative leader had got a bad inheritance from his predecessors, and that he had worked sincerely to clean up their mess. I can remember three people making this point, but one of these also ruled out voting Tory this year, while the other two were still undecided.
In fact, that’s where I found the most voters in this seat: in the undecided category. Some of these people surprised me, because they seemed to be sympathetic towards Mr Sunak earlier in the conversation, explaining away his shortcomings with circumstance. But when it came to putting their cards on the table, they insisted they really were undecided.
I have to imagine that these floating voters will be the ones ultimately to decide the fate of this seat. The numbers suggest (and indeed one person confirmed) that these people were past Tory voters, so it’s easy to imagine that when it comes to making-your-mind-up time, they will stick with the devil they know. But it’s a rough day for the Conservative party when, in a seat as safe as this one, they’re depending on undecided voters to break for them at the ballot box.
Do I think Mr Sunak will lose here? In spite of all the hysteria, I don’t. But this prediction is on a much-less secure footing than some others I’ve made, so I could be wrong. Yet until the count is in, my guess is Conservative HOLD.