Dr Patrick English is Director of Political Analytics at YouGov, and their spokesman on political research.
With local authority and devolved parliament elections happening in just under three weeks’ time, YouGov has been producing estimates of how races in Scotland, Wales, and London are shaping up.
All three areas are, to some extent, previous happy hunting grounds for the Conservatives. In Scotland, they are defending the impressive second-placed finished achieved by Douglas Ross in 2021, in an election where they replaced Labour as the largest pro-Union party north of the border. Andrew RT Davies also led the Conservatives to second place in Wales that year, moving back ahead of Plaid Cymru.
Those 2021 elections – which incidentally are also the baseline for a number of county council elections being held on 7th May, including Hampshire and Essex – were fought in the context of the ‘Boris vaccine bounce’ as the country began to emerge from Covid lockdowns with ‘jabs in arms’ and a spring in their step.
That baseline is an important one to keep in mind as the results come in over Friday and Saturday after the election. Some of the Conservative performances, including the aforementioned Hampshire and Essex, will look particularly bruising given that high watermark they are pitched against.
Indeed, our current Welsh and Scottish projections look particularly tough for the Conservatives. We believe that as things stand, the party will drop to fourth place in the Senedd and sixth place in Holyrood.
Elections last contested in 2022 should, theoretically, look significantly rosier for Kemi Badenoch and her party. The context of those elections was altogether very different as goes the Conservatives and the court of public opinion. May 2022 was deep into the ‘party gate’ scandal, during which voters had wholly and dramatically turned on Johnson and his government and had largely already decided that they wanted to turn the page after 12 years of Conservative administration.
Fighting elections today last contested when in a particular nadir ought to provide comparatively positive news stories for any party.
Except that even then, according to YouGov’s newly released projections in London, the rise of Reform UK in the intervening period could provide a source of significant frustration for a party looking to demonstrate that it is on its way back into favour and back to power.
While there have been some undoubted signs that Badenoch herself and her party have improved their position with the British public in recent months, they do so still as the second-placed party (in terms of popular support) on the British political right. A position they have been in since January 2025.
According to our London Borough elections MRP, the Conservatives are set to fall in terms of share of the vote in London even against 2022. Back then, the Conservatives registered 25 per cent of the vote and retained control of five councils.
Our data this week shows the party falling back to 17 per cent of the popular vote, and potentially losing control of both Bromley and Bexley to an insurgent Reform UK (who also look very well placed in both Barking and Dagenham and Havering).
In further frustrating news for the Conservatives, our model does not currently project the party to be winning back control of either Westminster or Wandsworth. These are, naturally, the top two Borough targets for a Conservative party looking to show they can win again.
In both, we believe they are currently fairly well placed but siting at just over 20 per cent of the vote in what is a highly fragmented and close contest. This might not sound like much, but with five parties now contesting and achieving significant vote shares in councils across the capital (and indeed the country), the ‘winning post’ in many could be as low as 25-30%.
For Labour’s part, we have them dropping significantly from 2022 in both Boroughs, but still north of 30 per cent.
The kicker for the Tories is that in both council areas, the size of the Reform vote is equal to or greater than the gap between themselves and Labour. In Westminster, the closer of the two contest, our central projection for the Conservatives is 23 per cent, with Labour on 30 per cent. Our model currently projects that Reform would win 12 per cent of the vote there.
Meanwhile, in Wandsworth, we have the Tories at 20% and Labour at 31%. The Reform vote is currently projected to be worth 11%.
These figures show the extent to which Reform UK continue to damage Conservative prospects in a serious way – just as they did in 2024 when slight improvements for Keir Starmer’s party in Labour-Conservative constituencies were enough to sweep to 400+ constituency wins, owing largely to Reform caving in the Tory vote seat by seat.
The optimists in the party could very much look at these figures with a degree of optimism, however. Though the current numbers project frustration, they are only just that – current. What the figures also show is a potential tactical voting squeeze that the Conservatives could put on. If they are able to find those Reform voters in Westminster and Wandsworth and convince them instead to support the Conservatives as the best placed party (on the right) to remove Labour from power there, then suddenly those races become quite different.