Conservatives have lost one-third of vote share since March as Brexit Party surges forward, says poll

Support for Theresa May's party slumps to just 25 per cent as voters deride her Brexit performance

The Conservatives have lost one-third of their vote share since March as Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party surges forward, a new poll has suggested.

Theresa May’s party plunged from 38 per cent support in March to just 25 per cent in May, while the insurgent Brexiteer group would now win 16 per cent of ballots in a general election, according to the poll conducted for the Evening Standard.

People were asked who they would vote for if a general election were held tomorrow. Labour would receive 27 per cent of votes and the Liberal Democrats 15 per cent, the phone survey of 1,072 people suggested.

A 25-per-cent share of the votes would be the Conservatives’ worst performance in at least a century, parliamentary research showed. Tallying election results since 1918, researchers found the Tories’ worst performance had come in 1997 when they achieved 30.7 per cent

Seven in 10 voters said the prime minister was performing poorly on Brexit, the Standard reported, while eight in 10 doubted her ability to achieve a good withdrawal deal with the EU.

It came as pressure on Ms May to quit reached its highest level yet.

Nick Timothy, her former top adviser who masterminded the Tories’ disastrous 2017 election campaign, urged the prime minister to “do her duty and stand aside”.

On Thursday Ms May met with members of the backbench 1922 committee, whose treasurer Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said before the showdown that “it would be infinitely preferable if she set a date rather than us force her out”.

Heaping further misery on the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer told MPs that Labour would vote against her Withdrawal Agreement Bill when it comes before the Commons at the beginning of June unless a cross-party agreement was reached.