Pollster: Conservative collapse started long before election | Wilnesh News

LONDON — After 14 years in power, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party looks on the verge of an electoral crushing defeat in the July 4 vote.

In the final days before the election, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tried to brave his party’s poor performance in the opinion polls – which pointed to a huge victory for rival Labor Party – he said , the result is not a good one.

While there will certainly be a reckoning after the election and serious soul-searching about what went wrong, political analysts tend to believe that Sunak will not be able to do much to repair the serious damage caused by previous leaders in recent years.

John Curtice, one of Britain’s most respected pollsters, attributes the party’s demise to two irreparably damaging events in recent years.

“This is not an election about party ideology, this is an election about competence,” Curtis told CNBC before the vote.

“The reason we’re in this situation is because the Conservatives have had a bad time, but they’ve performed badly.”

Curtis said “partygate”, revelations that government officials violated social gathering rules during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the short-lived Liz Truss government in 2022, whose ill-fated economic policies stoked market panic, It was the source of the party’s downfall.

“Those are the two defining events[of the election]everything else is variation and embellishment,” said Curtis, a professor of political science at the University of Strathclyde and a senior fellow at the National Center for Social Research.

“No government that has presided over a market crisis has survived at the ballot box. This is the death knell,” he added.

“At the same time, in this case, the government has abandoned not one but two prime ministers, one of whom (Boris Johnson) because of his improper relationship with the truth, which is something the Conservative Party has never been willing to admit.

Johnson resisted calls to resign and eventually resigned in June 2022. intentionally misleading Parliament decided to block the party despite the former prime minister’s strong denials of doing so. Sunak avoid the question On whether he agreed with the findings.

Johnson was replaced by Liz Truss, who, along with then-prime minister Kwasi Kwarteng, announced an aggressive tax-cut budget that triggered a market meltdown that roiled bond markets and led to a collapse in the pound fell.

A British tabloid live-streamed iceberg lettuce next to a framed photo of Truss, asking which had a longer shelf life. Lettuce won when Truss resigned in resignation after just 50 tumultuous days in office.

Mr Curtis said voters had not forgotten “party gate” or Mr Truss’s disastrous, short-lived tenure as prime minister, which could be important and influential factors when voters go to the polls on Thursday.

“Basically, voters voted against this government because they thought the government had screwed up, and they didn’t necessarily look at Labor with enthusiasm but ‘Oh my gosh, they certainly couldn’t have done any worse.'” At least (Keir)s Tamer sounds kind of sensible and boring, so they’ll vote for him.

Neither Sunak nor Labor leader Keir Starmer were willing to mention the polls much during the campaign – the former did not want to highlight Labour’s continued lead and the latter did not want to appear arrogant or make voters complacent. According to forecasts, Labor is expected to lead the Conservatives by 20 points, giving the center-left party about 40% of the vote and the Conservatives 20% Sky News Poll Tracker.