Could the Lib Dems become the official opposition?

Good morning. The Reform party launched its manifesto yesterday promising almost £90bn in tax cuts — a sum that raises questions such as “seriously, why stop there? Why not £180bn?”

But, of course, part of the point of Reform is that it is a way for some Conservative voters to vote for a party on the right without having to sully themselves with tricky questions about how the sums will add up.

Although no poll shows Reform getting close to gaining a significant numbers of seats, every poll taken since Nigel Farage chose to enter the campaign and since Rishi Sunak’s D-Day gaffe shows the Tory party in deep, deep trouble. Beforehand, the Conservative party was “just” on course for a crushing defeat. Now, the polls all show Reform doing well enough that the Conservative party’s grip on second place in the House of Commons is, at best, up for grabs.

Some thoughts on what might happen next below.

Yellow brick road

The big picture in this election is this: the polls are really, really, really bad for the Conservative party and we have no reason to believe that they are wrong besides a small margin of error. Although the Tory party had outperformed its opinion poll rating a little bit in the local elections, it has not done so enough to change the overall story.

In addition, a good rule of thumb is to remember that even when the polls are wrong, they tend to pick up the relative dynamic between the parties (even if they don’t get the exact levels of support right). We should be confident that the increased support for Reform and the Liberal Democrats we have seen since the start of the election is a real trend, and we know that both of those things further eat into the Conservative seat count. Some thoughts on what might happen next.

One thing that might happen is that Tory voters who think it is time for a change of government, but who want the Conservative party to remain intact as the main alternative to Labour, will return to the fold in sufficient numbers such that the Conservative party finishes ahead of the Lib Dems in terms of seats.

Another is that the Conservative party vote is distributed around the country in a way that means the more apocalyptic projections do not occur. As Oliver Hawkins and Jonathan Vincent explain in their piece on why different projections are showing different things, one of the biggest variables is how geographically varied the fall in the Tory vote ends up being.

A third possibility is that the polls stay as bad as they are for the Conservatives today, or they continue to slide, and the Lib Dems finish second in terms of seats while the Tories slump to third. Although there are some Lib Dems who incline more to the right, the party’s centre of gravity is on the left — and I don’t think it is likely that the Lib Dems will be able to replace the Conservatives on the right of British politics.

But we just don’t know for sure — if the trend in the polls continues, then an awful lot of voters and activists will not have much representation in the Commons and that energy will have to go somewhere. One place it might go is the Lib Dems, whose ultra-democratic structure means that it can change rapidly.

Another possibility, if Reform is able to win a handful of seats, is a reverse takeover of the Conservative party. I think there is a good chance of this, even if the election result looks something like what our free general election predictor spits out from the poll average today: Labour 457 Conservatives 96 Liberal Democrats 52.

In that situation, the Tory party will be so weak in parliament and will struggle to put together any meaningful opposition week to week. If there is even one Reform MP in the Commons, the calls for a tie-up will be very strong.

But all of this is impossible to predict until we know exactly what is going to happen in two weeks’ time. What we know at the moment is that the opinion polls were about right in May and since then the Tory party’s position has got worse not better. A Conservative meltdown and/or Ed Davey emerging as leader of the opposition seem farfetched, but they are not far from what the polls are telling us right now.

Now try this

I went to one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to last night: the Labèque siblings playing Philip Glass’s Cocteau Trilogy at the Barbican Centre. You can listen to the DG recording here, and I’ve added it, plus the encore, to the Inside Politics playlist.

Top stories today

• Room at the inn | The state sector has enough space to absorb an exodus of private school pupils should Labour remove their VAT break, FT analysis shows.

• ‘Project A30’ | Liberal Democrat aides are appealing to party donors to help them win over their former South West heartlands

• New rules | Rachel Reeves has signalled that private equity bosses who put their own capital at risk in a deal will have earnings taxed as a capital gain rather than as income.

• Extinction election? | In case you missed it, watch the new episode of Sketchy Politics here, where the FT’s UK chief political commentator Robert Shrimsley and deputy comment editor Miranda Green ask whether Reform will be behind an extinction level event for the Conservatives.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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