Rishi Sunak is on course to suffer a general election defeat similar to the Conservatives’ 1997 blowout, pollsters have found.
The latest YouGov polling has found Labour would win 403 seats from across the UK, leading to a 154-seat majority in the House of Commons.
The Conservatives would win just 155 seats, down from the 365 seats they won at the 2019 general election.
The analysis, which uses the multi-level regression and poststratification (MRP) method of polling, found that prominent Tory figures including Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg would be on course to lose their seats.
According to the pollsters, Rishi Sunak is heading for a worse result than John Major’s 1997 defeat, when the then-Tory leader won a total of 165 seats.
Sir Keir Starmer is, meanwhile, on course to win a victory on par with that of Tony Blair’s in his first term of office.
In 1997, the party’s longest-serving prime minister won 418 of the available 659 Commons seats.
The model is based on vote intention data collected and analysed by YouGov from 18,761 British adults interviewed from 7-27 March.
The Reform Party, led by Richard Tice, was found to have a growing share of the voting intention by YouGov.
It is not predicted to win any seats, and while it places second in 36 constituencies, it is not close to winning them.
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