The Conservatives face a potential wipeout in Berkshire, according to a new poll.
They currently hold six of the eight MP seats in the county. Berkshire now has nine parliamentary seats after the political map of England was redrawn.
The latest election projections from YouGov showed the number is likely to go down to two, with Labour taking five of the nine seats and the Liberal Democrats taking two.
It suggests Labour will win Reading Central, Reading West and Mid Berkshire, Earley and Woodley, Slough and Bracknell. If that result bears out, James Sunderland, the incumbent Conservative MP for Bracknell would lose his seat to Labour’s Peter Swallow.
It would also see Labour’s Matt Rodda maintaining his place in parliament as the new MP for Reading Central, beating off a challenge from the Conservative Raj Singh.
Yuan Yang, the Labour candidate for the new Earley and Woodley constituency, is also projected to win the battle in the Reading suburbs against Tory Pauline Jorgensen.
The election will see a host of new faces representing areas of Berkshire in Parliament due to several sitting MPs standing down. They include political veterans Sir Alok Sharma and Sir John Redwood, the Conservative MPs for Reading West and Wokingham respectively.
Their Conservative successors are both predicted to lose.
In Reading West and Mid Berkshire, Labour’s Olivia Bailey is projected to beat Ross Mackinnon, who became the Conservative candidate this February after Sir Alok announced he would be stepping down.
Sir John only recently announced that he would stand down as a MP two days after the election was called. His hopeful Conservative successor, Lucy Demery, is projected to lose against Clive Jones, who has been the Lib Dem candidate since February 2022.
The projection for Berkshire’s nine seats is part of YouGov’s new, multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) model, which uses polling data.
The MRP is not a ‘prediction’ of the July 4 election, according to the firm, but an estimate of the results if an election was held today.
