The Conservatives have moved ahead of Reform UK in a major new seat-by-seat poll, while Labour would lose its Commons majority and be left dependent on other parties to govern.
The latest YouGov MRP projection puts Labour on 241 seats, the Conservatives on 130 and Reform UK on 123, if a general election were held now.
It marks a dramatic change from YouGov’s equivalent projection last year, when Reform was estimated to be on course for 311 seats and the Conservatives just 45.
Labour would remain the largest party under the latest model, but would be 85 seats short of the 326 required for an overall Commons majority.
That would also represent a substantial fall from the 411 seats Labour secured at the 2024 general election.
The findings come from YouGov’s first MRP projection since Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, based on interviews with 14,000 people carried out between August 23 and September 18.
Despite Labour returning to first place in the model, the numbers point towards a hung Parliament rather than a return to the commanding majority the party won in 2024.
Even a Labour agreement with the Liberal Democrats, projected to take 71 seats, and the Greens, projected to win nine, would not on those figures reach the 326-seat threshold.
According to the projection reported by The Telegraph, Labour would therefore need support from additional parties, potentially including the SNP or Plaid Cymru, to assemble a Commons majority. The SNP is projected to take 48 seats and Plaid Cymru 15.
The numbers are likely to intensify the debate over the fragmentation of British politics, with neither Labour nor the two main parties on the Right anywhere close to governing alone.
For the Conservatives, however, the poll represents a striking recovery from their position a year ago.
YouGov’s previous comparable projection put the party on only 45 seats, while Reform appeared on course for 311. The latest model puts Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives on 130, seven ahead of Reform.
The Telegraph reported that Reform’s support has fallen during a difficult period for Nigel Farage’s party, which has faced scrutiny over its finances and donations.
Farage is subject to an ongoing parliamentary investigation concerning whether a £5 million gift from cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne should have been declared. Separately, the Metropolitan Police is investigating allegations concerning political donation rules following claims made in a Channel 4 News documentary.
Those matters remain investigations and do not themselves establish wrongdoing.
Two senior Reform figures, James Orr and Dan Jukes, also left their positions earlier this month as the party launched an internal investigation.
The new MRP contains another potentially significant development for Reform, suggesting that former Conservative Cabinet ministers Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, who defected to Reform earlier this year, would lose their seats to their former party if the model were replicated at an election.
Reform nevertheless remains slightly ahead of the Conservatives in national voting intention averages cited by The Telegraph, at 22.8 per cent against 20.3 per cent for the Tories. Its advantage, however, has narrowed substantially from its peak last year.
The Conservatives have attempted to rebuild support with a series of policy announcements under Badenoch, including pledges to abolish stamp duty, sharply reduce migration, leave the European Convention on Human Rights and abandon the legally binding 2050 net zero target.
The latest projection underlines the peculiar arithmetic facing the Right.
If the Conservatives and Reform totals in the MRP were combined, they would account for 253 seats, more than Labour’s 241, but still well short of a Commons majority.
Patrick English, YouGov’s head of elections, said the projection showed Labour ahead of both parties in seats despite only small differences in their respective shares of the vote.
He said the distribution of support across parties meant Labour potentially had more routes to assembling a parliamentary majority with other parties than either the Conservatives or Reform.
MRP, or multilevel regression and post-stratification, uses a large polling sample alongside demographic and constituency information to estimate results in individual seats. It is a modelling exercise rather than a forecast of what will necessarily happen at the next general election, and political opinion could change substantially before voters next go to the polls.
Nevertheless, the latest figures present a radically different political landscape from that seen just 12 months ago.
Reform’s seemingly unstoppable advance has weakened, the Conservatives have recovered considerable ground, and Labour, despite emerging as the largest party in the model, would be stripped of the huge parliamentary majority it secured in 2024.
For Burnham, therefore, the headline that Labour is back in first place comes with a substantial qualification: on these numbers, Labour could not govern alone.
