Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
In week four of the UK’s six-week election campaign Conservatives were trying to defend huge 2019 margins while Labour, seeking an historic landslide, attempted to shift attention towards Reform as a serious challenger in some seats. Tortoise’s campaign tracker showed Rishi Sunak campaigned in just five seats last week. Two of them – the newly configured seats of Grantham and Bourne, and Torridge and Tavistock – had implied Tory majorities of over 40 per cent in 2019. Labour is predicted to take both by a slim margin. Applied uniformly, a swing of that magnitude across the country would leave just 91 Conservatives seats in the next parliament.
Nigel Farage, in some ways the architect of the Conservatives’ dismal outlook, may be turning his sights on new enemies. Last week he campaigned outside his own target constituency of Clacton only twice, to visit Blackpool South and Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare – both held by Labour incumbents with strong Reform challengers.
It seems Labour has taken notice. Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, visited both Blackpool South and Ashfield – where ex-Tory MP Lee Anderson is leading in polls as the Reform candidate. Similarly, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves targeted seats last week with relatively lower 2019 Tory majorities and higher Reform vote shares than in previous weeks of the campaign.
Ed Davey followed a strategy much like previous weeks, targeting Tory seats with an average margin of 13 per cent over Lib Dems in the 2019 election. Davey is trying to flip southern seats – like Lewes and Yeovil – that were once Lib Dem strongholds but have voted Tory since 2010. Some polling suggests Ed Davey could be leader of the opposition in the next parliament. You can read our analysis of MRP polling here.
