Boris Johnson's Tories Face Dramatic Slump, Labour Garners 8-Point Lead in New Poll

57% of voters thought Boris Johnson should resign as Prime Minister, an Opinium poll for the Observer showed in mid-December, with his personal ratings taking a hit amid a succession of Tory lobbying and sleaze scandals.

The UK Labour Party has taken advantage of the scandals plaguing Boris Johnson’s Conservatives and grabbed an eight-point approval rating lead.

🚨Throughout December - on behalf of @thesundaytimes - we've been polling thousands of people (25,000 in total!) and have built an MRP model to give a constituency-by-constituency breakdown for how the country would vote if an election were held today.

The results are in.

— Focaldata (@focaldataHQ) December 26, 2021

Taken over a three-week period from 1 December and gleaning opinions of almost 25,000 people across all constituencies, a Focaldata poll showed that if a general election were to be held now, opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer would win with a 26-seat majority.

Furthermore, it revealed that Johnson would lose his seat in Uxbridge & South Ruislip, becoming the first sitting Prime Minister to be ejected from Parliament.

To put these results into a bit of historical context:
📌 237 seats would mark the Conservatives lowest haul since 2005
📌 32% vote share would set the Conservatives back to 2001 levels
📌In the post-war era, the jump in Lab seats would be surpassed only by the 1997 jump pic.twitter.com/UmkgkJGFzO

— Focaldata (@focaldataHQ) December 26, 2021

According to the survey, five other cabinet ministers would also stand to lose their seats if a general election were held now. Those on their way out would purportedly be Alok Sharma, the Cop26 president, and George Eustice, the Environment Secretary.

Overall, the Labour Party would win 338 seats, leaving the Tories with 237. Such a scenario would be the most disastrous since 2005, when the Labour Party led by Tony Blair won its third consecutive victory.

The MRP model shows Labour winning back EVERY Red Wall seat that voted Conservative in 2019.

It predicts that Labour will win all 50 Northern/Midlands/Welsh seats that voted Labour in 2017 but Conservative in 2019.

In a single election, this would be a remarkable reversal. pic.twitter.com/97pm1VE6ta

— Focaldata (@focaldataHQ) December 26, 2021

The multi-level regression and post-stratification poll (MRP) shows Labour winning 40 percent of the vote, while the Conservatives would win just 32 percent.

In 2019, the Tories won 43.6 percent and Labour 32.1 percent.

Justin Ibbett, chief executive of Focaldata, cautioned Keir Starmer as reading too much into the success, claiming it was more due to "Conservative collapse" rather than "a resurgent Labour".

“Boris Johnson has overseen a seismic drop in Conservative Party support across all sections of society. It compares to 1997, when Blair took power. The big difference now is that Starmer isn't seen as a leader-in-waiting," Ibbett was cited by Sunday Times as saying, he said

Just to wrap up, the startling Lab victory our model predicts is more driven by a Conservative collapse than a Labour surge. To be sure, Lab vote % increases, but not to the same degree that the Con % decreases.

— Focaldata (@focaldataHQ) December 26, 2021

Boris Johnson, who won a landslide election victory in December 2019, has seen his government mired in a series of scandals this year.

He has been fending off a barrage of criticism over Tory “sleaze” allegations in the wake of the Owen Paterson lobbying scandal.

Claims of illicit lockdown-breaching Christmas parties held at No 10 last year during strict COVID-19 restrictions have fed fuel to the flames. As a result, the Tories lost a previously secure North Shropshire seat to the Liberal Democrats in a by-election defeat on 16 December.