The herd of Conservative MPs is on the move again, this time obediently setting off towards the abattoir in which the careers of most will meet a grisly end. When historians come to write their accounts of the Conservative administrations of 2015-24, they will have a bewildering variety of ‘worst weeks’ to choose from, but the past seven days will have a strong claim to mark the moment when the fight went out of the parliamentary Conservative party and it became resigned to its fate.
Rishi Sunak achieved one thing of note this week
Two MRP polls with huge samples offering the possibility of constituency-level projections have offered a new range of likely outcomes. The first suggested just 98 Conservative MPs will be elected into the next parliament. That was so atrocious that when a second such poll predicted 155 Tory MPs, it actually felt like good news to some.
Of course, such an outcome would still be a worse result than either of the landslide defeats of 1997 and 2001.
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