One of Rishi Sunak’s most loyal cabinet allies has said Labour is heading for “the largest majority any party has ever achieved”.
Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, conceded that defeat in Thursday’s UK election appeared inevitable and said it was “highly unlikely” the polls were wrong.
Stride’s comments came as Sunak, Keir Starmer and others embarked on the final day of campaigning before voters go to the polls. In response to the remarks, Starmer accused the Conservatives of trying to suppress voter turnout.
Labour has maintained its 20-point polling lead over the Conservatives throughout the six-week campaign, suggesting it is heading for a landslide.
Stride, who was a supporter of Sunak’s Tory leadership campaign and has regularly been sent out to bat for the government on broadcast rounds, sought to warn against giving Labour “untrammelled” power.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I have accepted that where the polls are at the moment – and it seems highly unlikely that they are very, very wrong, because they’ve been consistently in the same place for some time – that we are therefore tomorrow highly likely to be in a situation where we have [with Labour] the largest majority that any party has ever achieved.”
Separately he told GB News: “If you look at the polls, it is pretty clear that Labour at this stage are heading for an extraordinary landslide on a scale that has probably never, ever been seen in this country before.”
He said that if about 130,000 people in about 100 marginal seats who might be considering voting Reform or Liberal Democrat supported the Tories, it would help to give parliament a more robust opposition. “I’m really worried about an untrammelled Labour party in power, and that really needs to be checked, and people will regret it if we don’t have that,” Stride told LBC.
The former home secretary Suella Braverman, a potential Tory leadership contender should Sunak go, wrote in the Telegraph that the election was “over” and called for a “searingly honest post-match analysis” as victory should no longer be the goal for the Tories.
“Thursday’s vote is now all about forming a strong enough opposition,” she wrote. “One needs to read the writing on the wall: it’s over, and we need to prepare for the reality and frustration of opposition.”
Starmer said the remarks from Stride and Braverman were an attempt to get voters to stay at home in order to limit their losses.
“You can see what the Tories are up to,” the Labour leader told reporters at a campaign event in Wales. “They’re trying to invite people not to exercise their democratic right to go out and vote, trying to dissuade people from voting. That is a terrible place for the Tory party to have got to.
“A once-respected party is now saying with 24 hours to go nothing that is positive, everything is negative, effectively, to run a campaign to suppress the vote.”
Braverman blamed the Tories’ dire poll ratings on a fracture within the party resulting from a rise in the popularity of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
She said: “It is notable that Labour’s vote share has not markedly increased in recent weeks, but our vote is evaporating from both left and right. The critics will cite Boris [Johnson] Liz [Truss], Rwanda, and, I can immodestly predict, even me as all being fatal to our ‘centrist’ vote.
“The reality is rather different: we are haemorrhaging votes largely to Reform. Why? Because we failed to cut immigration or tax or deal with the net zero and woke policies we have presided over for 14 years.”
Boris Johnson made an appearance at a Tory rally on Tuesday night in an attempt to give the Conservative campaign a late boost.
Labour’s national campaign coordinator, Pat McFadden, said he had “had boiled eggs that have lasted longer than this show of unity”.
“Almost before he [Johnson] was finished speaking, we had Suella Braverman in the Telegraph saying that it had all been a terrible mess,” McFadden told Times Radio. “It is all quite late for Boris to now be throwing his weight behind a prime minister, when, I think – to borrow a phrase from Northern Ireland – even the dogs in the street know there’s not a lot of love lost there.”
A Survation MRP poll, which includes constituency-level data, suggested it was “99% certain” that Starmer would win more seats than his party did in Tony Blair’s landslide. Labour won more than 418 seats in 1997.
The poll of 34,558 people said prominent Tory cabinet ministers who could lose their seats to Labour included the Commons leader, Penny Mordaunt, in Portsmouth North, the defence secretary, Grant Shapps, in Welwyn Hatfield, and the party chair, Richard Holden, in Basildon and Billericay.
It also said Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was set to lose in Godalming and Ash and Gillian Keegan would lose Chichester to the Liberal Democrats.
