The Tories would win fewer seats than the SNP if there was an election tomorrow - wiping them out as the official opposition, a veteran Conservative declared today.
Sir Charles Walker made the bombshell claim after a string of devastating polls for the Tories putting them well over 20 points behind Labour.
The Conservative Party ’s worst defeat in the last century was the 165 seats it won in 1997.
But in a poll of polls over the weekend, the Electoral Calculus website estimated the Tories would win just 48 seats if an election was tomorrow - with the SNP winning 52.
Labour would win 507 seats according to the “advanced modelling” of opinion polls of 11,358 people, giving the party a 364-seat majority.
Sir Charles told BBC Radio 4's The World At One: "If there was a general election tomorrow - which there won't be - we'd be a smaller party than the SNP. We wouldn't even be the party of opposition.
“That's bound to concern colleagues - hundreds of colleagues.
"The Prime Minister's position is enormously precarious. When you are in this sort of position I think you have got to expect the party won't tolerate for any length of time - certainly not weeks."
Electoral Calculus warns its seat projection is only approximate, and gives a wide range of possible seats to account for the margin for error.
The latest projection gives 90% confidence that the Tories would win between 18 and 192 seats at an election tomorrow - with 48 the central prediction.
Labour’s projected seats were between 369 and 557 within the 90% margin for error.
The numbers are scarcely believable to Westminster-watchers but come after a series of jaw-dropping polls.
Today Deltapoll gave Labour a 32-point lead over the Tories, with Keir Starmer ’s party on 55% and Liz Truss ’s on 23% in survey of 1,050 Brits on October 13-17.
In another poll, Opinium conducted a survey of more than 10,000 people before using its MRP model to project what this would mean in individual constituencies.
According to the results, Labour is set to win 411 seats, compared to 138 for the Conservatives, with the Liberal Democrats on 39 seats and SNP on 37.
Seven in 10 (71%) of those polled said they support retaining EU-derived workers’ rights such as holiday pay, safe limits on working times and rest breaks.
Chris Curtis, head of political polling at Opinium, said: “The new Prime Minister has faced a backlash from voters in her first month in office, with polls better resembling a nightmare than a honeymoon.
“The results are stark, showing that, if there were an election any time soon, a 1997-sized Labour landslide would be the most likely outcome.”
