Boris Johnson resorts to publicity stunt as UK election becomes ‘tight fight’
- Boris Johnson hopes to secure a majority government that would allow him to take Britain out of the European Union on January 31
- But a new YouGov poll, which correctly forecast Theresa May’s 2017 upset, showed election outcome could be hanging in the balance
As British voters head to the polls today for what could be a historic general election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s goal of a parliamentary majority to push through Brexit was, as he put it, turning out to be a “tight fight”.
The final poll by YouGov, a closely watched forecast published late Tuesday, narrowed the Conservative lead to just nine points over Labour, giving Johnson a majority of just 28 seats, down from 68.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party clawed back 20 seats it was slated to lose in the last YouGov poll, published in late November.
Founded by Nadim Zahawi a former junior minister in Johnson’s last government, YouGov, which makes predictions for every constituency, accurately predicted no clear Conservative majority in the 2017 election.
“Like all predictions our model comes with some uncertainty, and the margin of error here could put the final number of Conservative seats from 311 to 367. This means that we absolutely cannot rule out the 2019 election producing a hung parliament – nor can we rule out a larger Conservative majority,” YouGov said.
The poll predicted some Liberal Democratic gains, including in the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s seat of Esher and Walton in the Surrey stockbrokers belt, where he now has just a two-point lead.