Let’s assume two things. First, that the polls are right, and second, that the next general election will be held in the first week of October 2024. That puts us more than 400 days away from polling day and leaves the Conservatives around 20 percentage points behind Labour.
Using PollBasePro, a dataset that adjusts the polling for previous elections to better reflect actual public opinion (accounting for error, essentially), this means the Tories are about as far behind Labour as they were at this point in 1996 – but not quite as far behind as Harold Wilson’s Labour government was before the 1970 election.
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