Farage would be PM if EU poll results were repeated at a general election

What if Euro poll was a GENERAL election? Farage would be PM with a 200-seat majority – but in reality higher turnout would keep Nigel out of No 10 (probably)

  • Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party scored an historic victory at the European elections 
  • The same votes shares at a Westminster election would put him in Downing St
  • Experts stressed that EU elections often produce very different outcomes  

Nigel Farage might have delivered a political earthquake in the EU elections – but it would be nothing to the shock if he could replicate the performance in a Westminster election.

The Brexit Party would be sitting on a 200-plus seat majority if the votes broke down the same way in a general election, according to the Electoral Calculus website.

Such results would spell disaster for key Conservative strongholds – with constituencies held by Cabinet ministers Sajid Javid and Brandon Lewis among those most at risk. 

The figures will come as a brutal wake-up call to the Tories, although experts have played down the likelihood of a Westminster election having the same outcome.

 

Even though turnout was relatively high at 37 per cent, the 2017 general election had turnout of just under 69 per cent. 

While the European elections are conducted on a party list system, MPs are elected on a first-past-the-post basis. There would also probably be other policy issued at stake in a general election and the grass-roots machines of the two main parties could hold more sway. 

However, theoretically Mr Farage’s 31.6 per cent support would give the Brexit Party 446 out of 650 seats in the Commons, under the formula used by Electoral Calculus. That would be a significantly bigger majority than Tony Blair enjoyed in 1997.

Labour would have 93 MPs, and the Tories would be down to zero. The SNP would have 56 seats, the Liberal Democrats 31, the Greens one, and Plaid Cymru five.

Philip Cowley, politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, said today that reading across from EU election results to Westminster polls was ‘tricky’.

However, he pointed to 34 constituencies where local authority boundaries were the same as constituency boundaries, 

But he said the Brexit Party had won the popular vote in around a dozen of the others, including Mr Javid’s Bromsgrove seat and Mr Lewis’s Great Yarmouth constituency. 

The Lib Dems also came top in the West Oxfordshire area, which has the same borders as David Cameron’s former seat of Witney.  

Theoretically the 31.6 per cent support secured by the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage (pictured at BBC studios in London this morning) would give it 446 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons

Theoretically the 31.6 per cent support secured by the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage (pictured at BBC studios in London this morning) would give it 446 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons

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