Third of voters want Tories to be totally wiped out at General Election, polling suggests

Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, chosen to represent his party on Wednesday morning media interviews, suggested on Times Radio that the Tories were now focused on stopping a 1997-style "supermajority" victory for Labour. YouGov polling this week put Labour 20 points ahead of the Tories and on course to win 422 seats out of 650 in Parliament.

Mr Shapps said: "The polls have been wrong before but I think it’s perfectly legitimate to say the country doesn’t function well when you get majorities the size of Blair’s or even bigger.

"We would say there are a lot of very good, hardworking MPs who can hold the government of the day to account and we’d say those are Conservative MPs.”

Rishi Sunak, who in his own manifesto launch on Tuesday had himself urged voters not to give Labour a "blank cheque", subsequently told reporters his party was "absolutely not" conceding defeat when asked about Mr Shapps's remarks.

However another difficult day for the Conservative Party saw new figures reveal economic growth had stalled in April while online polling of more than 2,000 people by Public First found 46 per cent of voters agree that the Tories "deserve to lose every seat they have". Those agreeing with the sentiment included 24 per cent of voters who had backed the Conservatives in 2019.

A more specific follow-up question about the exact result voters wished to see saw 36 per cent confirm they hoped the Tories would get zero seats.

Seb Wride, director of polling at Public First, said the weighted polling results indicate "the scale of the anger with the Conservative Party."

He added: "It’s easy to lose track of just how far we’ve come since 2019. For the governing party to be seeing something like a third of the public genuinely wishing them to face total wipe-out is quite something."

It also emerged that former Tory minister Andrea Jenkyns has been sending out campaign leaflets featuring pictures of her with Reform leader Nigel Farage.

Ms Jenkyns, who is standing for re-election as the Conservative candidate for the new seat of Leeds South West and Morley, defended the decision by arguing that "all conservatives must be prepared to come together to prevent a socialist supermajority and the end of Britain as we know it".

Sir Keir Starmer, who will set out Labour's manifesto on Thursday, denied his party's victory is inevitable.

"We know that we have to earn every vote. Not a single vote has been cast and I know that every day we have to make a positive case for change.

“We will show in our manifesto that we have a plan for the country to renew, to rebuild, setting out the six steps that we will do on day one with our sleeves rolled up, but we need a mandate for that and we need to have the backing of the country for the change that I think the country needs.

“So I say what I said at the beginning of this campaign, if you do want change you have to vote for change.”