One of Rishi Sunak’s most loyal Cabinet allies has said Labour is likely to win “the largest majority any party has every achieved”.
Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride said it is “highly unlikely” that polls suggesting a victory for Sir Keir Starmer’s party are wrong.
But he said people will “regret” it if Labour wins the kind of landslide that means it has “untrammelled” power without an effective Tory opposition.
Mr Stride, who helped run Mr Sunak’s campaign for the Conservative leadership and has made regular appearances on the TV and radio during the election campaign as the Tories’ spokesman, appeared resigned to a heavy defeat.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I have accepted that where the polls are at the moment – and it seems highly unlikely that they are very, very wrong, because they’ve been consistently in the same place for some time – that we are therefore tomorrow highly likely to be in a situation where we have the largest majority that any party has ever achieved.”
Voter intention surveys have suggested a Labour lead of around 20 points, while massive multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) studies, which forecast constituency level results, have consistently indicated a Labour landslide.
Mr Stride told GB News: “If you look at the polls, it is pretty clear that Labour at this stage are heading for an extraordinary landslide on a scale that has probably never, ever been seen in this country before.”
But he said that if about 130,000 people in around 100 marginal seats who might be considering voting Reform or Liberal Democrat instead give their vote to the Tories, it would help to give Parliament a more robust opposition.
“I’m really worried about an untrammelled Labour Party in power, and that really needs to be checked, and people will regret it if we don’t have that, I think,” Mr Stride told LBC.
