According to pollster, the Conservative Party’s “death knell” was ringing long before the British elections – NBC Los Angeles

• Britain’s ruling Conservative Party is on the brink of a devastating electoral defeat in the July 4 vote, with the country’s leading pollster attributing the party’s decline to two extremely damaging events in recent years.
• “This election is not about the ideological position of the parties, but about competence,” John Curtice, Britain’s leading pollster, told CNBC.

LONDON — After 14 years in power, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party appears to be on the verge of a devastating electoral defeat in the July 4 vote.

In the final days before the election, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tried to put a good face on things, despite his party’s poor poll results – which point to a landslide victory for the rival Labour Party – by saying the result was not a “foregone conclusion”.

While the election will inevitably bring a reckoning and serious self-examination about what went wrong, political scientists largely agree that there is little Sunak could have done to undo the serious damage his predecessors have done in recent years.

John Curtice, one of Britain’s most respected pollsters, attributes the party’s decline to two irreparably damaging events in recent years.

“This election is not about the ideological position of the parties, but about competence,” Curtice told CNBC ahead of the vote.

“The reason we are where we are is because the Conservatives were dealt a bad hand and played it poorly.”

Curtice said “Partygate”, the revelation that government officials had broken rules on social gatherings during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the short-lived government of Liz Truss in 2022, whose ill-fated economic policies sparked a panic in the markets, were the causes of the party’s demise.

“These are the two crucial events (of the election), everything else is variations and embellishments,” noted Curtice, a politics professor at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research.

“No government that has gone through a market crisis has survived the elections. This is a death blow,” he added.

“And in the meantime, in this case, we have a government that has sacked not one but two prime ministers, and one of them (Boris Johnson) was sacked because he had a false connection to the truth, something the Conservative Party has never wanted to admit.”

Scandals and mismanagement

“Partygate” was the name of the scandal that erupted when it was revealed that government officials, including then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had attended parties and gatherings both in private homes and at work during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the lockdown.

Johnson resisted calls to resign before finally resigning in June 2022. An inquiry later concluded that Johnson had deliberately misled Parliament about lockdown parties, although the former prime minister vehemently denied this. Sunak dodged questions about whether he agreed with the findings.

Johnson was replaced by Liz Truss, who, along with her then Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, triggered a stock market crash by announcing a radical tax-cutting budget that roiled bond markets and sent the pound plummeting.

A British tabloid newspaper livestreamed an iceberg lettuce next to a framed photo of Truss and asked which salad would last longer. The lettuce won out when Truss reluctantly resigned after just 50 turbulent days in office.

Curtice said voters had not forgotten the Partygate affair or Truss’s disastrous and short-lived tenure as prime minister, and those factors were likely to be important and influential when voters go to the polls on Thursday.

“Essentially, voters are voting against this government because they think it’s screwed up, and they don’t necessarily look at the Labour Party with enthusiasm, they look at it with the attitude of ‘Oh my God, they can’t make it any worse.’ At least (Keir) Starmer sounds reasonably sensible and very boring. So they’re going to vote for him.”

Both Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer have been cautious about relying too heavily on the polls during the election campaign – the former not wanting to highlight Labour’s consistent lead, the latter not wanting to appear arrogant or alienate voters. According to a Sky News poll tracker, Labour is expected to finish 20 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives, giving the centre-left around 40 percent of the vote to the Tories’ 20 percent.