Tory MPs need to stop infighting to avoid hefty defeat

‘Tories have turned the Rwanda Bill into a electoral liability’

-  Ross Clark

MAY BE it was the grim YouGov poll which brought Tory MPs to their senses, or perhaps the whips were more charming than usual. Either way the Conservative Party pulled back from the brink on Wednesday evening.

The threatened rebellion against the Prime Minister's Rwanda Bill failed to materialise on the scale necessary to cancel out the Government's majority.

That crisis might now be in the past but there is still a long way to go before the Tories can avoid an electoral collapse. A general election defeat now looks almost inevitable excepting some piece of self-destruction on Labour's part but there is still a big difference between modest defeat, from which the party might recover within a single parliament, and a 1997-style wipeout which kept the Conservatives out of office for three terms.

This week's YouGov poll painted a picture that is ominously similar to that in the last days of John Major's wretched government. This poll interviewed 14,000 people - one or two thousand is more typical and analysed opinions at a constituency level.

IT PREDICTED that the Tories would lose 196 seats, leaving them with a rump of just 169 seats. Labour would win a majority of 120 seats: the largest of any party since 2001.