Top Political Party Faces Major Election Defeat

 

World’s ‘Most Successful’ Political Party Stares at Sweeping Defeat in U.K. Election

After 14 years in power, Britain’s Conservative Party looks like it’s headed into the electoral wilderness.

LONDON—By Friday, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will almost certainly be drummed out of Downing Street and his ruling Conservative Party facing its deepest hole in more than a century. 

Polls ahead of Thursday’s U.K. election show the opposition Labour Party and its leader Keir Starmer on course to win by a margin of about 20 percentage points, ending 14 years of government by the ruling Tories. The question is, What will be the scale of the defeat for the world’s oldest and most successful political party, measured by years in power over the past 150 years? 

If polls are right, the Conservatives are on course to get only about 20% of the popular vote—their lowest share in modern British history and less than half the 43.5% of the vote they racked up in the last general election, in 2019 when the party won a huge parliamentary majority with 365 seats compared with just 203 for Labour. 

According to a Survation poll Tuesday, the Tories are on course to slump to just 64 seats in Parliament, leaving them at risk of being usurped by the Liberal Democrats as Britain’s main opposition party.

For the Tories, the looming defeat caps more than a decade in power that has seen five prime ministers and dramatic moments such as Britain’s vote in 2016 to leave the European Union. Ever since, the British economy has struggled, hurt further by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. And the party has often been riven by conflict and buffeted by scandal. Party lawmakers are now bracing for at best five years in opposition and at worst internal divisions that could tear it apart. 

Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs banker, has spent the last few days of the campaign urging voters to elect enough Tories that Labour will have a real opposition and not “a blank check.”

Even as the Tories limped toward the end of their parliamentary term, they ran a campaign widely seen as strewn with mistakes. 

In May, Sunak surprised almost everyone by calling an early election for this summer, despite being far behind in the polls. As he made the announcement outside 10 Downing St., a rainstorm broke and the prime minister, with no umbrella, continued to make his campaign pitch even as he got drenched.