Now that it’s less than a year until the next UK election, you’d expect according to the normal rules of politics an energetic Tory effort to mount a recovery against their dire polling.

Out-of-control immigration, the top-of-mind concern for many conservative voters, would be a good place to start. So what news on that front? Firstly the Home Office ‘loses’ 23,000 asylum-seekers and reveals many of the rest have been allowed to work.  Next it emerges it gave £230 million to a charity lobbying against the government’s Rwanda asylum-processing plan. And then we discover how you get asylum if you’ve been knocked back and then committed serious crimes: even if everyone knows you’re a devout Muslim, claim you’ve converted to Christianity.

All this chaos has emerged as Britons have absorbed the grim news that the population, currently 67 million, will hit 70 million in just two years’ time. The surge is driven overwhelmingly by immigration – which hit a record net 745,000 in 2022. The government has half-heartedly changed a few policies that might reduce the annual figure by about 300,000. That won’t impress voters, especially as the Tories long promised to reduce annual net immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’.

Sunak’s efforts to stop cross-Channel illegal immigration also could flop. The hapless Tories have been floundering trying to launch their Rwanda plan for almost two years, under three prime ministers. Even if it ever gets off the ground, it’s doubtful it would deter the people smugglers. It’s not clear Rwanda has capacity for more than a few hundred arrivals – and 76,000 illegal immigrants have arrived across the Channel in the past two years (many brought to British shores by the farcically named coast guard vessel Defender). In any case, either the House of Lords could block the offshore processing enabling law or deportations could be derailed yet again by legal challenges. The Tory right proposed amendments to stop that prospect, but Sunak sided with the party’s ‘One Nation’ woke lefties in opposing them. Most Tories don’t appear to want strong borders.

The new year has also revealed as smoke and mirrors Sunak’s promise to ‘ease the burden on working people’ of his net-zero 2050 commitment. Close to 2,000 employees at the steelworks at Port Talbot, Wales, are set to lose their jobs because the plant’s furnaces are coal-fired. Not much easing of the burden on those working people, then.  Moreover while last year Sunak delayed the ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, he’s rejected matching even the climate-obsessed EU’s acceptance beyond 2035 of new internal combustion engine vehicles which use e-fuels. A regime of aggressive fines has begun against retailers who don’t succeed in persuading a reluctant public to buy electric vehicles – fines which will flow into increased prices. As noted in the Times, ‘There’s a limited number of customers for cars that cost more while offering less, and most of those customers already bought one.’

The kamikaze Sunak government now isn’t even offering earlier foreshadowed significant tax cuts that might have fired up its steadily dwindling support base. It prefers to focus on mimicry of Jacinda Ardern’s bizarre plan to ban tobacco sales forever to anyone born after 2008.

As has been the case for most of Sunak’s time in Number 10, the Tories are around 20 points behind Labour, apparently heading for an epic defeat at least on the scale of Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide. Many on the Tory right want to replace Sunak, widely seen as a politically tin-eared technocrat who doesn’t understand ordinary people. While rising panic could result in yet another Tory regicide, it’s hard to see an obvious, popular alternative leader, or the likelihood of the radical change which might turn the party’s fortunes around.

There’s even more grim news for Sunak.  Unlike at the last election in 2019, Reform UK, Britain’s only mainstream conservative party, of which Nigel Farage is honorary chairman, will challenge the Tories in all their seats. According to a recent poll, Reform UK, with support it estimated at 9 per cent, would lose the Tories 96 seats, about half their projected losses. Even more ominously, this poll didn’t factor in a further boost for Reform UK were Nigel Farage to take over as leader. According to the Conservative Lord David Frost, were this to happen, the election ‘might start to look like an extinction event’.

Farage has failed on seven occasions to win a Westminister seat, but polling shows he would comfortably win the Essex seat of Clacton from the Tories. Farage says this has made him consider ‘more seriously than ever’ a return to frontline politics. Other polls suggest that, were he to make the leap and lead Reform UK, it would have a dramatic impact on the election. One poll found a third of all voters, including a quarter of Labour supporters, were open to voting for a party led by Farage. Another found that, among those who voted Conservative in 2019, almost half think Farage would be a better prime minister than Sunak.

With Reform UK currently only about seven points behind the Tories, even without Farage at its helm, it’s conceivable that the party, with him as leader, could win more votes than the Tories. Whether that might translate into Westminster seats won and if so how many would only become clearer with polling closer to the election. Still, unless the Tories change radically, they risk being eclipsed by Reform UK as Britain’s main conservative party. The current Tory status as the dominant Westminster party of the centre-right isn’t set in stone, and history shows radical shifts – notably the early twentieth-century decline of the Liberals and the rise of Labour.

The likely coming Labour landslide isn’t because of the party’s popularity but because previous Tory voters have gone on strike in protest at the Conservatives’ leftward shift. It’s hard to think of another recent time in Britain when there’s been such a vacuum on the right and opportunity for a genuinely conservative party. As the election approaches, it would be surprising if the most significant recent figure in British politics was content to remain on the sidelines.