Poll says Tories will lose Henley at election

THE Conservative Party will lose the Henley parliamentary seat at the general election, according to an opinion poll.

The YouGov national survey suggested the Tories will retain only one of the seven seats available in Oxfordshire when the country goes to the polls, probably late this year.

It predicted the Tories will secure Witney but the other six seats will go to either the Liberal Democrats or Labour.

The survey of 140,000 people suggested that the Conservatives, who have been in Government since 2010, face a polls disaster across the UK.

YouGov predicts Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will retain just 169 seats and that Labour will secure an overall majority with 385 seats.

This means the Tories will secure 196 fewer seats that in 2019, when former Henley MP Boris Johnson won a massive majority.

John Howell is the MP for the Henley constituency, succeeding Mr Johnson when he became mayor of London in 2008.

He will not be standing for re-election.

YouGov said that Liberal Democrat candidate Freddie van Mierlo, who is a county councillor, will overturn Mr Howell’s majority of more than 14,000.

If this happened, it would be the first time since 1910 that the constituency has not been represented by a Conservative MP.

The YouGov poll was carried out using the Multilevel Regression with Poststratification method, which is a statistical technique used for correcting model estimates between a sample and target population.

Before the 2019 election, this method predicted that Mr Johnson would win 359 seats, six fewer than the actual total.

Meanhwile, Mr Howell remained loyal to the Government when he voted against amendments to the Rwanda Bill put forward by rebel Conservative MPs in Parliament on Tuesday.

More than 60 MPs backed the amendments to the Safety of Rwanda Bill.

Right wing MPs claimed the amendments would help to protect the Government’s flagship asylum policy from legal challenge.

Two deputy Conservative chairmen, Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith, stepped down in order to vote for the amendments.