Tory contenders won’t save the party, warns top pollster

Britain’s top pollster has warned that the Conservatives will not win elections if Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch end up becoming the party’s next leader.

- ARCHIE MITCHELL

Professor Sir John Curtice described the pair, battling it out in the last stage of the race to succeed Rishi Sunak, as “unknown quantities” who do not have what it takes to turn the Tories’ fortunes around.

“In short, despite their ideological stance, neither Ms Badenoch nor Mr Jenrick is necessarily well set to heal the electoral divide on the right,” he writes in a damning article for The Independent.

Prof Curtice also said neither candidate has “an adequate understanding of why their party suffered its worst ever electoral result in July”, meaning they are unlikely to “take the steps needed for their party to regain voters’ trust”.

He pointed to ongoing rows at the top of the Conservative Party about whether it was too left wing in government, overseeing an expansion of the state and implementing policies to boost diversity and inclusion.

Prof Curtice said: “However, an examination of the timeline of the Conservatives’ standing in the polls during the last parliament reveals that the party’s precipitous fall from grace was not occasioned by a failure to be truly Conservative.”