It is going to be “extremely difficult” for the Conservative Party to win the next general election, a polling expert has said.
Professor Sir John Curtice said prime minister Rishi Sunak was significantly more popular than his party.
However, he said voters were unlikely to forgive the Conservatives for the financial crisis unleashed by Liz Truss.
Curtice, who is president of the British Polling Council, said the Labour Party were the current favourites to win an election in two years.
Asked if the Tories could win, Curtice told a briefing of Westminster journalists: “History suggests that it’s going to be extremely difficult.
“No government that has presided over a financial crisis has ever survived at the ballot box.
“Voters don’t forget governments being forced to do a U-turn by financial markets.”
He said while it could be argued the Labour Party did not quite get thrown out in 1950, they did not last long.
“It does look as though voters don’t forget a government being forced to do a U-turn by the financial markets and particularly basically overseas investors telling us that we’ve got it wrong. This doesn’t go down terribly well for governments,” Curtice said.
“It’s going to be very, very difficult. You can already see how there is an incredible gap between Sunak’s personal popularity and the proportion of people who are going to vote for his party.
“The fact that Sunak is as popular as he is, is a remarkable testament to his own reputation.”
He also referred to recent polls that had seen the public pick Labour over the Tories but prefer Sunak over Labour leader Keir Starmer.
While Sunak’s popularity took a hit over his wife’s non-dom status and partygate, Curtice added: ”His role as Chancellor as having saved the economy, or he saved the labour market is still with him. It does mean that personally he’s got a reputation”
Curtice said that at the height of Truss’s unpopularity, the Tories had been trailing Labour by more than 30 points in the polls suggesting they could have been left with fewer than 60 seats if that pattern had been repeated at a general election.
He said that the Conservatives had “lost ground” across the whole of the electorate, with the public feeling that they could not run the economy.
Curtice said a lot would depend on what happens to the economy in the next two years and if Sunak can turn it around without “too much pain” for public services.
“Maybe he can, but it won’t be easy. And the odds are against him. It’s pretty clear that, at the moment two years out, the Labour party are favourites to win the next election.”
He said for the first time in this parliament it looked as though Labour had a “half decent chance” of winning an overall majority.
Curtice also said that support for rejoining the EU has been growing steadily over the past year with the latest polling suggesting 57 per cent would favour rejoining with 43 per cent against.