Conservative Party Support Falls to Lowest Level in Polling History as Farage’s Reform Rises

Support for the British Conservative Party has fallen to its lowest levels in polling history, according to leading psephologist Professor John Curtice.

It is just a little over two weeks before Britons will cast their votes for the July 4th election called by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his party is facing a political disaster of historic proportions as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party continues to strip away support from the Conservatives.

Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, said that “every poll has reported a fall in Conservative support and nearly all the narrowing of the Conservative lead over Reform.”

“So, what last week was an average eight-point Conservative lead over Reform has now halved to just four points – and standing at just 20%, Conservative support is now at its lowest ever in British polling history.”

“Mr Sunak, whose own personal ratings have clearly fallen, must be beginning to doubt his decision to call the election early,” Curtice said.

The Tories have struggled to formulate a winning message with Prime Minister Sunak after he was installed as leader in a palace coup in late 2022 without a vote and against the wishes of the conservative party membership itself, which had only months before voted against making him leader.

The Reform Party, formerly known as the Brexit Party, still lags behind the Tories in average of polls, however, the Farage-led party sent shockwaves through the British political establishment after a YouGov survey put the upstart populist party ahead of the Conservatives for the first time in history.

During the election, Mr Farage has argued that the Conservatives have abandoned their traditional conservative values, overseeing the highest levels of immigration in history despite promising over the past 14 years to cut immigration and imposing the highest tax burden since the Second World War to pay off the massive debt accumulated during the coronavirus lockdowns.

Therefore, with the left-wing Labour Party of Sir Keir Starmer essentially a shoo-in to win the election, the Brexit leader has asserted that only Reform UK is positioned to represent an actual small-c conservative opposition.

More fundamentally, Farage, who has vowed to stay on as Reform leader until at least the 2029 general election, has promised to wage a political “revolt” against the Westminster establishment and take on the globalist Blairite orthodoxy which both Labour and the Conservatives have now come to represent.

Although the Labour Party currently holds a commanding double-digit lead in the polls, this appears to be more of a product of anger at the Conservatives rather than genuine enthusiasm for Labour’s policy platform, which is not too dissimilar from that of the Tories.

This then may represent an opening for an outside party to break through the structural disadvantages of Britain’s first-past-the-post parliamentary system, which favours the two primary parties.

Indeed, a survey from Opinium for the Observer published on Sunday found that the Labour and Tory parties are on pace to secure their lowest combined support in an election since WW2 as the public moves towards supporting alternative parties, including the Liberal Democrats and the Greens on the left and Reform UK on the right.

Contrary to the 2019 election when outside parties saw their support drop by 10 points from the first survey to the final poll — as voters consolidated behind either the Tories or Labour — Opinium found that this year, outside parties have seen their support increase by five points since the election was called by Prime Minister Sunak.

“Voters are turning away from the two major parties in a huge break with the trend seen in the 2019 general election campaign when the smaller parties’ votes were squeezed,” the head of policy and public affairs at Opinium James Crouch said.

“The biggest surprise is that both major parties are being hit, with Labour and the Conservatives down to their lowest share of the vote since Liz Truss was in office.”

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