Sir Keir Starmer is on course to be the UK's next prime minister and will command a parliamentary majority, according to new projections released this morning.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39% of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow.
The SNP would see its benches reduced from 46 seats to just 21, with the Lib Dems leapfrogging them as Westminster's third-biggest party, while six cabinet ministers are forecast to lose their seats, including Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3% of the vote, from 43.6% won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001.
Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
The polling, carried out for The Times and Times Radio, shows the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8% of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
In Scotland the SNP, fighting its first national election since Nicola Sturgeon resigned as first minister, would fall from 44 seats to 25.
The findings also suggest that neither candidate for No 10 has won the overwhelming personal support of voters, however. Nearly half, 48%, picked “neither” as their preferred leader.
Starmer was second on 32% and Sunak behind on 19%.
Stonehaven, a member of the British Polling Council, surveyed 2,001 voters in England, Wales and Scotland between August 29 and August 31.
A multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) model applied demographic and other data to the survey to build a constituency-by-constituency projection of the outcome.