Nigel Farage is on track to become Britain’s next prime minister, with a major new poll showing the party is close to having enough support to form a majority government if an election were held today.
The seat-by-seat YouGov poll, the second such poll since the election, indicates the party has extended its lead over Labour, significantly increasing Mr Farage’s chances of entering Downing Street in 2029.
It suggests Reform would increase its MPs from just five to 311, making it the largest party in a hung parliament and just 15 seats short of the 326 needed for an outright majority.
In June, the last time YouGov conducted a seat-by-seat poll, it put Reform on track to have 271 MPs.
The multi-level regression and post-stratification poll (MRP) showed Labour would lose 267 of the seats it won in 2024, putting the party on just 144 MPs. This is down from the 178 MPs YouGov predicted they would win in their last MRP poll.
There would also be a significant number of cabinet casualties, with ministers Bridget Phillipson, Ed Miliband, Lisa Nandy, John Healey, Jonathan Reynolds, Emma Reynolds, Pat McFadden, Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper all at risk of losing their seats.
Writing in The Times in the wake of the polling, pollster Sir John Curtice issued a stark warning, saying Labour MPs have “every reason to fear being swept away in a tsunami of unpopularity that would be every bit as damaging as that which engulfed the Conservatives last year”.
But Conservative peer and pollster Lord Hayward told The Independent the YouGov polling should be treated with "extreme caution", warning against looking at polls "this far out from a general election".
"If you go back, Boris Johnson swept the local elections in 2021 and he wasn't even prime minister a year later. So treat with caution - extreme caution."
But he said there is no denying that Reform are in a strong position, saying their success is “visibly causing problems to both the legacy parties, Conservative and Labour”.
"If you look at the opinion polls, not just MRP polls, but political opinion polls in general, there's no question Reform had a good recess in September. Immigration, which is their issue, has become the number one issue.
“It's very rare in any Western democracy for the economy not to be the number one issue, but immigration is the main issue... So there's no question that Reform are strong.
“It is visibly causing problems to both the legacy parties, Conservative and Labour, but Labour in government."
The poll shows that 231 Labour seats would be lost to Reform, 26 would be lost to the SNP, and the remaining 10 would be split between the other parties.
The Tories would also face a disaster scenario, being left with just 45 MPs, the poll showed – putting them behind Reform UK, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, which the poll put at 78 MPs. This is a marginal improvement from the 72 seats they won at the general election.
Meanwhile, the SNP would win 37 seats, the Greens would win seven, and Plaid Cymru would win six.
The disastrous polling for Labour comes amid growing questions over Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the party, with voters increasingly feeling that Labour has so far failed to get a grip on the problems facing the country.
There are now an increasing number of Labour MPs looking to Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham as a possible successor to the prime minister.
This week, Mr Burnham said Labour MPs are privately urging him to challenge for the Labour leadership, accusing Downing Street of creating a “climate of fear” and that “wholesale change” was needed to see off the “existential” threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
It came as Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who has been an outspoken ally of Sir Keir since he took over as leader, refused to say he has full confidence in the prime minister.
But speaking to regional media, Sir Keir insisted he would lead Labour into the next election, saying he has been “very clear that this is a project of national renewal”.
“I’m very clear that that is a 10-year project. I led from the front into the last election. I’ll lead from the front into the next election,” he told ITV Meridian.
The PM also dismissed the “personal ambitions” of Mr Burnham and seemed to attack his potential leadership rival’s economic agenda by drawing parallels with Liz Truss.
Speaking to BBC North West, Sir Keir said: “I’m not going to get drawn into commenting on the personal ambitions of the mayor, but I do want to be really clear about our fiscal rules because economic stability is the foundation stone of this government.
“It was three years this week ago that we had the Liz Truss experiment where she abandoned fiscal rules, in her case for tax cuts, and the result was a disaster for working people.
“The same would be true if you abandoned fiscal rules in favour of spending. And I’m not prepared to ever have that inflicted on working people again.”
If the latest YouGov polling materialised at an election, it would leave Reform able to form a majority government with the Conservatives. But Labour would be unable to form a majority even if it were to agree a pact with the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens.
Mr Farage has previously said Reform has “no intention in forming coalitions with the Tories at any level” because “the Tories broke Britain nationally for 14 years, and their councils continue to break local communities with the highest taxes ever and worst services”.
The MRP poll, which surveys political support at a constituency level, was based on a survey of more than 11,000 people.
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