Boris’s fate will be decided by Lib Dem voters

The Tories’ great fear in this campaign is that they can get their vote out, squeeze the Brexit party right down and still lose. Why? Because their strategy relies on the Liberal Democrats taking a chunk out of Labour’s Remain vote. If Labour manages to rally the Remain vote in the way that it did in 2017, then we are heading into hung parliament territory and a situation where the Tories cannot govern because they have no potential partners.

The complication for the Tories is that they also need to win back a chunk of their Remain voters who have gone over to the Liberal Democrats and hold off a challenge from Jo Swinson’s party in a host of constituencies. There are 20-odd seats that the Tories hold which the Liberal Democrats would take with a swing of 15 per cent or less.

Some Tories think that Swinson should take part in the big TV debate with Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn because it would aid her effort to peel off Labour Remainers. But one influential figure on the Tory campaign dismisses that idea as ‘too clever by half’, pointing out that if Swinson repeated Nick Clegg’s 2010 debate victory, then dozens of Tory seats would become vulnerable to the Liberal Democrats. The Tories can’t simply talk up the Liberal Democrats in an attempt to help them take a chunk out of Labour’s Remain vote.

In their own seats, the Tories intend to squeeze the Liberal Democrats in two ways. First, they’ll emphasise that a vote for the Liberal Democrats risks making Corbyn prime minister. The Tories want to argue that this election is about whether you want Johnson or Corbyn as PM, which explains why they are so keen for the two to go head-to-head on TV.