Could the Tories could be heading for a worse result than 1997?
The modest Tory recovery appears to have fizzled out
It might have been forgotten but the Labour GB vote lead in the 1997 General Election when Tony Blair won his landslide was just 12%.
Such a gap in a current opinion poll would be regarded by the Tories in the current context as a stunning recovery.
Looking back over the past couple of months the Tories got the gap down to 5% in September but everything changed with the Truss/Kwarteng budget and since then we have seen LAB leads rise to the mid 30s.
The hard fact is that Sunak doesn’t appear to have made a big impression though it would be ridiculous for the Tories to consider another leader at this stage. Starmer might not have the star quality of Tony Blair but his team of leading shadow ministers, almost all of them women, is very impressive as we saw with the Rachel Reeves performance this week.