Election latest: Tories 'facing electoral extinction', says pollster - as candidate says he agrees with Nigel Farage (2024)

Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick has penned an op-ed appealing for the right-wing of British politics to pull together to avoid ending up in a "one-party state" under Labour that will "change our country for the worse".

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the likely Tory leadership candidate (should the Tories lose next month and Mr Sunak step down), admitted that the "right-wingcommon sense majority is fatally divided between the Conservatives and Reform", which could give Labour "a majority so large, they can change our country for a generation".

As a result, he is making an appeal "to heads over hearts".

He said he has "immense sympathy for those natural conservatives who feel let down and drawn to Reform" - and that he shares "many" of their "frustrations".

He pointed to high taxes, the "soft" criminal justice system, and public services that are "too inefficient".

Touting his own credential, he noted that he quit the cabinet due to disagreements with Rishi Sunak's government on immigration.

But he repeated the party line that "a vote for Reform will only give Labour a blank cheque to take our country back to the 1970s".

"Some voters feel so angry with the Tories that a Labour landslide is a price they are willing to pay. Again, I have great sympathy with their frustrations and know that we must meet the British public's expectations.

That is the task I have dedicated myself to since resigning. But don't be fooled by Labour’s cautious public posture."

Mr Jenrick went on to attack Labour, saying they will raise taxes, expand "expensive and unaccountable government quangos", and bring in "toxic diversity, equity and inclusion policies that divide and discriminate against hard-working people".

Concluding, he argued that Reform UK "cannot be the answer", and appealed to natural conservatives to vote for the Conservative Party.

Rishi Sunak has given an interview in which he accepted full responsibility for his party's performance in this general election, and spoke about how he is carrying on through the disastrous campaign.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, the PM said he is not frustrated that voters are not rewarding him for steadying the ship after the chaotic 49-day Truss premiership, saying his faith carries him through.

He told the paper: "In Hinduism, there's a concept of duty called dharma, which is roughly translated as being about doing your duty and not having a focus on the outcomes of it.

"And you do [your duty] because it's the right thing to do, and you have to detach your self from the outcome of it."

He said it is "not an easy thing to do", but that he was raised with it, and said it gives him "the strength to deal with" the challenges he is facing.

"I get fulfilment from just doing what I believe is right."

Following a series of terrible polls - including one from YouGov showing Reform UK overtaking the Tories for the first time, Mr Sunak was asked if Liz Truss is to blame for the party's position.

But he rejected that, replying: "I'm ultimately responsible for what I'm doing and no one else is. It rests on my shoulders."

He went on: "Look, we have had a tough time. But I really think that after a lot of hard work and resilience from everybody, we've got through the worst of that, and we've turned a corner."

By Dr Hannah Bunting, Sky News elections analyst, and Joely Santa Cruz, data journalist

This week, the leaders were selling their visions to voters as they launched their manifestos, and Sunak and Starmer went head to head in Grimsby at the Sky News live election special The Battle For Number 10.

Watch their journeys in the latest week in our animated map below.

This campaign is being fought on new electoral boundaries, with many constituencies undergoing significant changes since 2019.

For the purposes of this analysis, we use notional results based on calculations by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, Honorary Professors at the University of Exeter, which estimate the 2019 election seat results if they had taken place on the new constituency boundaries.

Read the full piece below:

Beth Rigby has revealed how she decided on a "narrative" before quizzing the Labour and Tory leaders at Sky News's special event - and how a morning run almost scuppered everything.

Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak took turns for a 45-minute grilling at Sky News' Battle For Number 10 in Grimsby, with questions coming from a representative audience.

First to interrogate both leaders was political editor Rigby, who has lifted the lid on what it's like to prepare, execute (and almost miss) the big event.

"Kay Burley told me when I first came into telly 'fail to prepare, prepare to fail'," she told former Labour MP Margaret Hodge on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast.

"So, I took these two mottos into this very intense interview prep… you get loads of information and you start to try and work out what's the narrative that you want to tell."

The secret, she said, is to look at everything and then "distil it" until you have a clear "narrative arc".

"With Starmer, the thing really was - how can you trust this guy? That was the premise," she said.

"But for Sunak, it was like, you say you've got a clear plan, you say you're going to deliver… so, what's the Conservative record? But more importantly, what's your record?

"Because you've actually been prime minister. You made five pledges, and then there was a broader question about what were the betrayals to the British people."

But disaster almost struck before the event had even started.

"The night before, I woke up at, like, five in the morning, fully awake," she said, adding she could "feel the adrenaline".

So, she decided to go for a run.

"I just saw I'm coming to the end of the road. And I went to turn round, and, as I turned, I nearly ran into a moving car. So, I nearly got run over," she explained.

Not the kind of car crash anyone would have expected that day.

Listen to the full podcast here:

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Email the team electoraldysfunction@sky.uk, post on X to @BethRigby, or send a WhatsApp voice note on 07934 200 444.

By Tom Cheshire, Megan Harwood-Baynes, Mary Poynter, online campaign team

How bad is the Conservative brand?

Bad enough for dozens of its own candidates to avoid using it, according to research from Sky's Online Campaign Team and Who Targets Me.

We looked at the adverts published on Facebook and Instagram by 521 Labour and Conservative candidates from 1 May until 12 June.

Of these, 376 adverts contained official branding (logos and colours), 104 had some form of partial branding, and 41 had no branding at all.

And the vast majority of those with no branding - 38 - were Conservative.

Read more here:

On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer faced a grilling from Sky's political editor Beth Rigbyand our live audience in Grimsby on their plans for government.

The two men were questioned on their pledges to the electorate, their trustworthiness, their records, and whether they are suited to lead the country as it faces challenges on many fronts.

If you were not able to watch the programme - fear not, because we are airing an hour-long highlights show live on Sky News now.

You can also watch live in the stream above, and at the link below.

You can watch Sky News free wherever you get your news.

Sky channel 501, Virgin channel 602, Freeview channel 233, on theSky News websiteandappor onYouTube.

Sir Keir Starmer came under fire this week for repeatedly dodging a question from Sky's Beth Rigbyabout if he really though Jeremy Corbyn would've made a great PM, which he said in 2019, and instead repeated that he didn't think they would actually win.

Labour shadow minister Andrew Gwynne was national campaign coordinator under Mr Corbyn, and we ask if he thought Mr Corbyn would win.

He replies: "We didn't win the election, we were defeated. I will always campaign for a Labour government because any Labour government, I believe, is better suited to government.

"But look, we didn't win, and you have to listen to the electorate."

Pushed on the question, he replies: "I saw what the opinion polls were saying. I heard what the focus groups were saying, and I knew that it would be a very difficult ask for Jeremy Corbyn to be the prime minister.

"But I'm a Labour MP. I support the Labour leader."

Next on Politics Hub With Ali Fortescue, we are speaking to Labour's shadow minister for social care, Andrew Gwynne, and we start by asking where the money will come from for their plans to reform social care.

The plan itself, he explains, it to give staff a "fair pay agreement" and creating a "national care service".

"This is a decade-long plan to reform social care into a system that wraps around the needs of the individual in a way that, quite frankly, social care services don't at the moment."

On where the money will come from, he says for payment of staff, it will come from "the sector themselves", which will improve "recruitment and retention".

Additionally, he says that more money will come in "not least by improving and changing the way we do health care in England" which "means that we free up resources to ship people out of hospital and to spend that resource within the community".

"So it's not just about new money, it's about spending the money, the many billions of pounds that we spend on health and care within a hospital setting, when actually better care and better outcomes can be provided within the home setting."

Challenged on the fact that he seems to be proposing to just move things around, rather than invest, he replied: "I can't wave a magic wand with the social care system that we would likely inherit and fix it overnight."

But he wants to make sure the workforce feels "valued" through pay, stopping the care system being a "postcode lottery", and making it a "genuine partnership between local and national government".

Finally,we ask Tory candidate Sir Philip Davies if Boris Johnson is the source of many of the problems the party is facing, given that he once labelled him the most left-wing PM since Harold Wilson.

He points to the high net migration figures as evidence of Mr Johnson's "liberalattitude towards immigration", and praises, Rishi Sunak for having "radically changed" the rules, which he says will bring numbers down.

Sir Philip criticises lockdowns during the COVID pandemic, which he labels "socialism", and says that policy, which resulted in things like the furlough scheme, are why taxes are so high now.

He also labels Mr Johnson a "fanatic for net zero", and praises Mr Sunak for rolling back those policies.

He goes on to say that they've had three global disasters to deal with during their 14 years in office - the financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, and the war in Ukraine.

"Not many governments have three once in a century issues to deal with over the last 14 years," he says.

"And I don't believe that the Labour Party would have dealt with them any better, frankly."

But this is an "election about the future", and the job of the Tory party is to "point out that actually people will be a lot better off with a Conservative government than they will be with the disaster of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner introducing their socialist manifesto".

Next, we askTory candidate Sir Philip Davies how worried he is about the threat from Nigel Farage's Reform UK after a YouGov poll this week showed them polling higher than the Tories for the first time.

Sir Philip replies that it was "one poll", and says YouGov is an outlier compared to other pollsters.

"In fact, you get to the point where you think that YouGovare a campaigning organisation masquerading as a polling company, to be perfectly honest - so far out are they from other people."

He goes on to say that he is among the many people who agree with what Mr Farage says.

"If you sat me and him down in your studio next to each other, you'd probably find that we wouldn't be disagreeing on many issues."

But he picks holes in the Reform UK leader's statements, saying that on one hand is claiming to be the real opposition to Labour, while on the other stating that they might just win two seats.

"That shows what the situation really is - it's that voting Reform is voting for Keir Starmer to be prime minister with a big majority."

The job of the Tory party, he says, is to "persuade Conservative voters not to be seduced by this sort of Farage mania".

Sir Philip says it's "crazy" that Mr Farage is not in the Tory party, saying he would like to see him join.

"All Nigel Farage is doing at this election, and I'm sure it's doing his ego - which is already the size of a small [planet] a lot of good - but all he's doing, aside from massaging that ego, he's helping Keir Starmer build as big a majority as possible in parliament."