The Labour Party has extended its lead over the Conservatives, according to the first exclusive YouGov poll.
One week into the race for Number 10, Labour is 27 points ahead of the Tories – erasing a small drop in the lead recorded at the end of last week.
The Great Britain poll – conducted on Monday and Tuesday this week – puts Labour on 47%, the Tories on 20%, Reform on 12%, the Liberal Democrats on 9% and the Greens on 7%.
This suggests the Conservatives have not yet recovered from Rishi Sunak’s surprising decision to enter on the 4th of July rather than waiting until the autumn.
The party is also still struggling to hold together the voter coalition that Boris Johnson won in 2019.
Just 36% of this year’s Conservative voters said they would vote Conservative now, 19% said they would vote for Reform Britain, 19% were unsure and 14% said they would switch to Labour.
This was the main group identified by Conservative HQ and Sunday’s national announcement was aimed at bringing this group back into the group.
Labour is now outperforming the Conservatives across the UK and among both men and women.
The only groups in which the Conservatives are ahead are the over-65s and those who voted to leave the EU, although by a much smaller margin than in 2019.
Mr Sunak called the general election last Wednesday after official figures showed inflation had fallen to 2.3% in April, saying it was “proof that the plans and priorities I have set out are working”.
Other parties and many Conservative MPs were surprised by the announcement, but the election campaign is on now.
When the latest survey was published this Wednesday, the Prime Minister was visiting Cornwall, where he promised to create 100,000 jobs a year by focusing on apprenticeships and abolishing “rip-off degrees”, the lowest-performing university courses.
After the Conservatives “passed” a plan to “halve the number of young people on apprenticeships”, the Labour Party condemned the policy as “ridiculous”.
Sir Keir Starmer’s party is aiming to clear the NHS backlog and has promised to provide an extra 40,000 appointments, scans and surgeries every evening and weekend, and double the number of scanners.