Tories can roar back...but only if they regain a sense of purpose darned quick

TWELVE days from now, the British people may terminate the political careers of more than three quarters of all Conservative MPs.

- Patrick O'Flynn

If the consistent pattern suggested by multiple opinion polls comes to pass on General Election day, then the Tories will suffer a different order of defeat and we will need to find new terminology to describe it.

Landslide will not do that term probably reaches the end of its tether if a party loses as badly as the Conservatives did to Tony Blair back in 1997 when their strength in the House of Commons dropped by a half to 165 MPs.

Some recent opinion polls point to barely a coach party of Tories getting elected this time, perhaps as few as 50.

It is conceivable, on these ratings, that the Conservatives won't even be the official opposition come the morning of Friday, July 5. That would be an earthquake of such a magnitude that it would bust the known political Richter scale.

Even if there is some kind of recovery in Tory fortunes in the last few days of the campaign, it is now hard to see the party holding on in many more than 100 constituencies.

Meanwhile, a quirk of the first-past-thepost electoral system could well mean Keir Starmer and Labour win a huge majority on the back of an insipid campaign and a relatively modest vote share of around 40 per cent. That will probably just about match the combined vote of the Conservatives, plus Nigel Farage's right-ofcentre Reform party. But first-past-the-post is likely to confine Reform to one taxi-load of MPs, or a minibus at best.

Where the Right is bitterly divided between two parties whose senior personnel appear to hold each other in contempt the Left has constructed an informal pact between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Senior figures in those two parties rarely speak ill of each other and there is an understanding that the Lib Dems will focus on about 40 seats, where they came second to the Tories last time. This leaves Labour well-placed to harness an anti-Tory tactical vote in the rest of the country.