A NEW poll shows what could happen in Herefordshire if a General Election was held today – and it's not good news for one Tory MP.

The latest modelling from Electoral Calculus predicts a huge Labour landslide in the next General Election based on current opinion polling – far greater than even the majorities achieved by Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001.

 

On their most likely scenario, the model predicts Labour would win 507 seats, 303 more than they achieved in 2019.

Meanwhile, the Tories would be incredibly on just 48 seats, 307 down from their 2019 total of 365.

This would also leave the Scottish National Party (SNP) as the official opposition with 52 seats, giving Labour an overall majority of 364.

Elsewhere, the Lib Dems would be on 19 seats, the Greens one, and none for the Reform party.

Within the margin of error of the modelling, the best-case scenario for the Tories puts them on 192 seats, whilst the worst put them on just 18.

For Labour, the best case scenario is 557 seats and the worst is 369.

If the model turns out to be a true reflection of the General Election result, it would result in the Hereford and South Herefordshire constituency being won by Labour.

That would be history in the making, with Labour never having won the Hereford seat which has switched between Conservatives and Liberals.

It could mean Jesse Norman, if he stood for re-election, would lose.

In North Herefordshire, Sir Bill Wiggin's seat, he should just be able to hold on, but could lose his current comfortable majority.

A spokesperson for Electoral Calculus said: "Since the government's mini-budget on 23 September, support for the Conservative party has fallen far and fast."

It comes as the Conservatives will find it “extremely difficult” to win the next general election despite some signs of recovery under Rishi Sunak, the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice has said.

Sir John, who is president of the British Polling Council, said that while the new Prime Minister is significantly more popular than his party, voters were unlikely to forgive the Tories for the financial crisis that his predecessor Liz Truss unleashed.

“No government that has presided over a financial crisis has eventually survived at the ballot box. Voters don’t forget governments being forced to do a U-turn by the financial markets,” he said at a briefing for Westminster journalists.

Sir John said that at the height of Ms Truss’s unpopularity, the Conservatives had been trailing Labour by more than 30 points in the polls, suggesting they could have been left with fewer than 60 seats if that pattern had been repeated at a general election.

He also said that support for rejoining the EU has been growing steadily over the past year, with the latest polling suggesting 57 per cent would favour rejoining with 43 per cent against it.

Sir John said Ms Truss had been “virtually unique” as a new party leader in failing to secure a “honeymoon bounce” in the polls when she was chosen to succeed Boris Johnson.

By the time she left Downing St in the aftermath of Kwasi Kwarteng’s calamitous mini-budget, the Tories were on average 31 points behind Labour with a deficit at least as great as at any point in Sir John Major’s premiership.

“I think arguably this is as bad as it ever was for a government,” Sir John said.

While there has been some recovery under Mr Sunak, he said the Conservatives were still 25 points behind while it appeared Labour now has a “half decent chance” of securing an overall majority at the next general election.

Mr Sunak is, however, “relatively popular” and has overtaken Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer as who is the strongest on the economy, even though his party continues to trail on the issue.

“The real question is to what extent is Sunak going to be able to transfer his personal popularity into popularity for his party. Certainly, when it comes to people’s willingness to vote for the Conservative Party, there is still a lot of work to do,” Sir John said.