The battle to find Starmer’s succesor as LOTO?
Is that being too harsh?
We now know much more about how the Conservative leadership contest is going to operate with the outcome being revealed in the first week of September. At least it is pretty certain are that the winner will be able to move into Number 10 as Prime Minister and have perhaps two years in the top job. But what about after that?
Whoever it is has got a massive task ahead simply to ensure that the party survives the next general election. For last night we saw the worst polling figures for the Tories for nearly a decade and there are few indications that the party will be any other than the main opposition in 2024.
The task is enormous because at the last election Johnson’s Tory Party was facing the Corbyn and came away with a national vote lead of nearly 12%. Now most polls have LAB with double digit poll leads and one overnight had the margin at 15%.
My belief is that the new leader should do significantly better than Johnson would have done and it is possible that we could see Tory leads during the honeymoon period. But the Tories need to do much better than that just to stay in power. Being ahead on GB votes will not be enough. For the hard fact is that Tories need an overall majority while Starmer can become PM even if LAB has fewer votes and MPs
Who knows though? The next election could be a shock result like John Major’s at GE1992.