‘Risky’ Tories, ‘drama queen’ Jenrick and Farage’s Trump problem: voters’ verdict on the battle for the right

In focus groups in Warrington and Godalming, there was a feeling Keir Starmer was adrift – but are Reform’s ‘Globetrotters’ the answer?

Boris Johnson’s election victory in 2019 was so sweeping you could walk from Land’s End to Hadrian’s Wall without ever leaving a Tory constituency. You could also have walked between two constituencies where More in Common ran focus groups with 2019 Conservative voters this week – Warrington South and Godalming and Ash. These are two seats that tell the story of the breadth and collapse of the Conservatives’ 2019 coalition.

Warrington South, a north-west marginal that has flipped between Labour and the Conservatives, sits just outside the “red wall”. It voted leave in 2016, backed Johnson in 2019 and swung to Labour in 2024. Today, More in Common’s MRP (multi-level regression and post-stratification) modelling suggests it would be won comfortably by Reform UK.