Tories 27-points behind

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/



This week's YouGov poll for The Times puts Labour's lead at a commanding 27-points, up four points from last week, with support for the Tories falling to its lowest level since Liz Truss was prime minister

All those priorities, long-term plans, promises of change and promises of stability, and here we are. Upon seeing these numbers I remember the words of one senior Tory MP earlier this week. It was, they told me, “hard to be hopeful when 20 points behind, and no change for a year in this position”. Now it's even worse. Doubtless MPs will be told this is just one poll, to take no notice of it – an order issued frequently, and which even the most credulous will be tiring of by now.

But Tory MPs will be fashioning their favoured explanations for this widening deficit as we speak. Is it, as some of the right argued earlier this week, the product of a failure to take immigration seriously? Reform UK are, it's worth noting, now up to 12 per cent. Or is it, as MPs on the moderate wing have insisted to me – and as Isaac Levido, the party's campaign manager, told MPs this week – yet more evidence that when the party is bitterly, visibly divided, they lose support? Consider, they say, that there had been some progress in the polls before last summer, when the partygate report and Boris Johnson's resignation reignited divisions and reversed any progress. “Those polling numbers do not make great reading”, was the candid response from Chris Philp, the policing minister, on Times Radio this morning. Others will put it in slightly stronger terms than that.