British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gets off a bus in Carterton, Britain, on July 2.Phil Noble/Reuters
Britain’s election campaign is ending almost exactly where it started six weeks ago: with the Labour Party holding a substantial lead in opinion polls and projected to secure a massive victory Thursday.
Labour has held a 20-point lead in most polls for the past two years, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s attempt to catch his opponents off guard by calling a snap election for July 4 appears to have failed miserably.
Modelling by polling company Survation, using data from 30,000 respondents, showed Labour winning about 484 seats in the 650-seat Parliament. “The scale of the Labour victory forecast by our model is unprecedented,” Survation said in a report released Tuesday.
The Conservatives have won four straight elections since 2010. However, a string of scandals and internal feuding that prompted three leadership changes in two years have turned off many voters.
Mr. Sunak has only been party leader and prime minister for 18 months but has faced an uphill battle in trying to shake off the party’s recent past.
He took over in the fall of 2022 from Liz Truss, who lasted just 49 days in office because her mini-budget caused havoc in financial markets. She had replaced Boris Johnson after he was ousted by Tory MPs that summer over a series of scandals, including lying to Parliament and holding social gatherings at Downing Street during the pandemic in violation of lockdown restrictions.
Mr. Sunak has tried to shift the focus of the campaign onto the dangers of a Labour government and has repeatedly warned voters not to “surrender” to Labour Leader Keir Starmer. But the message does not seem to have broken through.
The Conservatives are forecast to lose about 300 seats Thursday and finish with about 64, according to Survation’s model. That would be the party’s worst showing ever and would put it barely ahead of the Liberal Democrats, who are projected to win 61 seats.
Mr. Sunak is still hoping enough voters will change their minds at the last minute, and the Tories even brought out Mr. Johnson to make a final pitch. Labour “can achieve nothing in this election except to usher in the most left-wing government since the war with a huge majority, and we must not let it happen,” Mr. Johnson told a rally in London Tuesday evening.
But several senior Conservatives have conceded that a Labour win is inevitable.
“I totally accept that where the polls are at the moment means that tomorrow is likely to see the largest Labour landslide majority that this country has ever seen,” Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride told the BBC Wednesday.
Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is considered a candidate to replace Mr. Sunak as leader, went further in an article in The Daily Telegraph. The election “is over and we need to prepare for the reality and frustration of opposition,” she wrote Tuesday.
Ms. Braverman sharply criticized Mr. Sunak and others for failing to recognize the challenge posed by Reform U.K., a right-wing party created three years ago by Brexit champion Nigel Farage. Mr. Farage has been campaigning on a pledge to slash immigration and return the country to what he believes are traditional British values. Polls show Reform has been gaining on the Conservatives and now trails the Tories by just a few percentage points.
Ms. Braverman said voters have abandoned the Tories for Reform “because we failed to cut immigration or tax, or deal with the net zero and woke policies we have presided over for 14 years.”
Mr. Starmer’s main concern throughout the campaign has been to manage expectations and avoid complacency. Recent polls have shown that Labour’s lead has been narrowing slightly in the past few days.
Victoria Honeyman, a professor of British politics at the University of Leeds, expects a closer race than many pundits have predicted. While she expects Labour to win a majority, she doubted the party would match its 1945 result of 393 seats. “A ‘super-majority’ or something on the scale of 1945 is, in my view, highly unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely,” she said Wednesday.
Rob Ford, a political science professor at the University of Manchester, said voters have become far more volatile, so even if Labour wins, Mr. Starmer could have trouble hanging on to his majority in the next election.
“The challenges facing the incoming Labour government are daunting,” said Dr. Ford, who pointed to Britain’s sluggish economy and high cost of living. He added that Labour’s current popularity has more to do with voters wanting to punish the Conservatives. “Once that mist of rage fades away, they’ll start getting grumpy with the new incumbent government fairly quickly, I suspect,” he said.