Rishi Sunak’s former special adviser is working with a group of rebels trying to oust the prime minister and helped commission polling which predicted a landslide Labour victory, according to reports.
Will Dry, who worked as an adviser at Downing Street, quit in November last year after becoming “dispirited” by the direction being taken by Sunak, the Times reported.
Since leaving No 10, he has been working with a group of former government advisers and MPs who believe the Tories “are heading for the most almighty of defeats” in the forthcoming general election under Sunak.
In a statement published on X by the Sun’s political editor, Harry Cole, Dry said: “Everyone in the country can see just how colossal the challenges we face are. Sadly, it became clear to me we weren’t providing the bold, decisive action to overcome those challenges.
“You cannot dent them without internalising how just how fundamentally broken our political system is.”
Dry, 26, helped to draw up questions for a recent YouGov poll of 14,000 people commissioned by unnamed Tory donors, calling themselves the Conservative Britain Alliance (CBA) grouping.
The poll reported that the Conservatives are heading for an electoral wipeout on the scale of their 1997 defeat by Labour.
Dry added: “I further concluded, again sorrowfully, that the Conservatives are heading for the most almighty of defeats. Be in no doubt: we are on course for at least a decade of Labour rule.
“And if [Nigel] Farage comes back, the Conservative party won’t exist by Christmas.”
The polling, set out in the Daily Telegraph, was presented by Conservative peer and former Brexit negotiator David Frost, with the estimated £70,000 cost covered by the previously unknown CBA.
Under British Polling Council guidelines, all polls have to say who commissioned them. However, it needs only a name to be contacted – in this case Lord Frost – and does not need to specify who paid for the work.
Dry’s comments follow a call by Simon Clarke, who was a cabinet minister in Liz Truss’s short-lived government, for Sunak to quit and make way for a new Tory leader.
In an opinion piece for the Telegraph, published online on Tuesday evening, Clarke said Sunak’s “uninspiring leadership is the main obstacle to our recovery” and that he has “sadly gone from asset to anchor”.
Clarke argued that Sunak “is leading the Conservatives into an election where we will be massacred” because “he does not get what Britain needs. And he is not listening to what the British people want.”
