COLLAPSING Conservatives lost their campaign director today as the party was rocked by a fresh row over insider betting on the election date.
Tony Lee was forced to take leave of absence from the campaign as the suspension of his wife, Tory candidate Laura Saunders, was called for by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
The Gambling Commission is reported to be looking into bets placed on the timing of the election. Another Tory candidate who worked in Downing Street, Craig Williams, has already apologised for wagering on a July election in the days before PM Rishi Sunak called the snap poll.
Ms Saunders is the Conservative standard-bearer in Bristol North-West and previously worked at Tory headquarters.
Sir Keir said: “This candidate should be suspended, and it’s very telling that Rishi Sunak has not already done that.
“If it was one of my candidates, their feet would not have touched the floor.”
He added that the Prime Minister should give a full account of the betting row — one of Mr Sunak’s police detail is also being probed — and slammed “the politics of self-entitlement, where politicians are sort of in it for themselves.”
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey called the reports “immoral, illegal” and “corruption,” while Nigel Farage said “it looks like the Conservative Party is more corrupt than even its worst critics could have imagined.”
The row came amid a further unravelling of the Tory campaign, with the Prime Minister no longer able to regard holding his own seat in Richmond, Yorkshire, as a safe bet.
A major poll conducted for the Telegraph showed that he would not be one of just 53 Tory MPs slated to survive after July 4 and would become the first premier in history to lose his own seat in a general election.
About three-quarters of the Cabinet would also be shown the door by the voters, the poll indicates, with the rump Tories outnumbering the Liberal Democrats, on 50, by just three seats, leaving Sir Ed’s party within touching distance of becoming the official opposition.
The mega-poll, by Savanta and Electoral Calculus, projects a record-beating Labour majority in the Commons of 382, with Sir Keir heading up a Parliamentary Labour Party of 516 MPs.
Reform’s surge in the opinion polls would still leave the hard-right party with zero seats, with its owner Nigel Farage losing once more in Clacton, and the Scottish National Party down to just eight MPs.
The figures led outgoing top Tory Michael Gove to warn that Labour could become “a forever government,” indicating the despair gripping the ruling party as he conceded it would now be a “stretch” for the Conservatives to win.
He urged the Tories not to lurch rightwards after the election, which may be hard to avoid since the culture warrior Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch is about the only senior figure forecast to retain a Commons seat, putting her in pole position to inherit the poisoned chalice of leadership.
Mr Gove blamed the party’s dire position on the legacy of Liz Truss, or what he euphemistically described as the “period between Boris and Rishi” wherein the residual Tory reputation for economic competence was exploded by Ms Truss’s manic mini-budget.
However Jeremy Hunt, appointed chancellor to clear up the mess the short-lived Truss premiership left behind and now struggling to hold his own Surrey seat from a Liberal Democrat challenge, said he did not think she had been all that bad.
“I don’t think it’s fair to say that there was a sustained economic scarring from [the Truss period],” he said.
“I think if you look at us now — with lower inflation, higher growth than most major economies — we’re actually doing very well.”
Clearly the Tory campaign is not doing very well, however. An Ipsos poll found that just 16 per cent of voters believe that the Conservatives are having a good campaign, under the circumstances, an absurdly inflated figure.