Morning Call: Between a Blue Wall and a hard place

Will Conservatives be annihilated in south-east England as well?

David Gauke

Good morning. David Gauke here doing Morning Call. Not that it is a good morning for many of my former colleagues as yet another MRP poll is produced showing that large numbers of Conservative MPs look like they will lose their seats. More on that below.

Some of my more sensible former colleagues will also be alarmed by the interview Rishi Sunak has given to the Sun in which he hints strongly that he favours leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. I won’t go through all the arguments as to why that is a bad idea (I had a go at that back in August) but it certainly won’t help the Tories in the Blue Wall.

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What if the polls are true? Jonn Elledge asked this question in the NS recently and it’s worth examining in greater detail. What if the Blue Wall – of traditionally Conservative seats in the greater south-east of England – is about to fall?

It is a question that Conservative MPs are increasingly asking themselves as Labour’s poll lead stubbornly refuses to fall. Particular attention is always paid to multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) polling which takes a large national sample and then applies the results to reflect the populations within each individual constituency. In the UK, MRP polling has a good record on a constituency-by-constituency basis. This is why two MRP polls, one from Survation at the weekend and one from YouGov yesterday, are causing such concern.

The Survation MRP poll is the bleakest for the Tories. Labour wins an extraordinary 465 seats, the Conservatives fall to 98, the SNP wins 41 seats (which sounds high to me), and the Liberal Democrats, 22. Yesterday’s YouGov poll, meanwhile, has Labour on 403, the Tories on 155, the Lib Dems on 49 and the SNP on 19.

In the Blue Wall, the two polls tell somewhat different stories. But in both Labour win seats across Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Berkshire, Sussex, Buckinghamshire, Surrey and Oxfordshire – the shires and the home counties: the redoubts of Conservative England.

For those of us hoping for a revival of sensible centre-right politics, what happens in the Blue Wall will matter. If the Blue Wall stays blue, it will be a proportionately larger part of the Conservative parliamentary party. This is a part of the country that much preferred the Conservative Party of 2015 to the populist iterations that followed, that wants a party focused on economic competence and respecting Britain’s institutions, and thinks that leaving the EU was a mistake. This is the kind of Tory party in which I was a minister. It is possible this version of conservatism might prevail after the coming fall.