Tory conference: Liz Truss very unlikely to win next election, activists told

The Conservatives are almost certainly heading for defeat at the next general election, pollsters told a packed meeting at the party's conference.

The panel savaged Liz Truss's first weeks in power and suggested Labour's double digit poll lead might be almost impossible to overturn by 2024.

It meant Sir Keir Starmer is on course to be the next PM, they agreed.

Veteran US pollster Frank Luntz offered a brutal message to the party faithful in Birmingham.

"If you want to win, stop bitching, stop griping, stop complaining and get [it] together," he told the packed meeting organised by think tank CapX.

He said the party's MPs had to start communicating with voters in a language they understood, and talking about things which mattered to them.

He also took aim at defeated Tory leadership contender and former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who has opted to stay away from this week's conference.

"Where is Rishi Sunak? Why is he not here?" he asked the audience of Tory members.

If Mr Sunak was here he could "start to unify the party, you guys can go forward together," added Mr Luntz.

"When people don't even show up, what are the voters supposed to think?"

In a scathing assessment of Liz Truss's first weeks in power, Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the Conservatives' 2019 election manifesto, said the new prime minister had no mandate from voters or her own MPs for the "ambitious" Thatcherite agenda she was pursuing.

She accused Ms Truss of "appearing not to care" about the impact her policies will have on voters worried about the cost of living,

"People are feeling poorer," she added, and they don't think the solutions Liz Truss has come up with "make any sense".

Ms Wolf, co-founder of polling company Public First, and a former adviser to Michael Gove, picked apart Ms Truss's claim to be a strong leader in the mould of Margaret Thatcher, and not afraid of unpopular policies.

The crucial difference between the two, she argued, was that Lady Thatcher had an electoral and Parliamentary mandate for her policies and was capable of articulating them in way that resonated with ordinary voters.

"Thatcher was always a strong leader," she told the meeting, "but she was of the people, she spoke in their language".

Pursuing an "ambitious Thatcherite agenda" without a mandate was a recipe for disaster at the polls, she suggested, and she hoped Conservative MPs could at least start to demonstrate some unity and competence.

She also had a message for Sir Keir Starmer.

"People are voting against the government but they are not voting for Labour, That might quite possibly be enough but it is the thing I would be most worried about if I were him.

"The thing that always comes up with Starmer, and still does, is that he has no views, no ideas of his own."

Asked about the qualities needed in a modern leader, she said: "It's very hard to support a leader who is uninterested in, or despises, you.

"It's not whether they are strong, whether they have a view of their own, if they fundamentally don't seem to like their electorate very much, or don't think they are worth considering it's very hard to vote for them."

James Johnson, a founder of pollsters JL Partners, who conducted private polling and opinion research for Theresa May when she was prime minister, said the party could not turn its fortunes around by selecting another new leader.

Boris Johnson had become unelectable after Partygate, but it had only damaged his own reputation not the Tory brand as a whole, he told the meeting.

"Now unfortunately, I think that has changed and this is damage to Liz Truss's brand but also to the Conservative brand.

"I want to be able to say that one of the ways turn things round over the next two years is we get this new, fantastic leader.

"But I think the Conservative Party would look absolutely stark, raving mad if it had another PM. I think it would just entrench the brand problems that are all there."