Who will win the battle to become Westminster's 'third party'?

The Liberal Democrats are on course to overtake the SNP and become Westminster's third largest party at the upcoming general election, according to the latest modelling by pollsters.

YouGov's first MRP projection of the campaign suggested that Labour would win a "historic" majority of 194 seats, with the Conservatives reduced to 140 seats, while the Lib Dems could end up with 48 seats, up from 11 at the 2019 general election. The SNP would be left with 17.

Meanwhile, the Green Party is predicted to win its second ever Westminster seat, in Bristol Central, with Plaid Cymru also on course to win two seats. Reform UK – despite the party's meteoric rise in voter intention polls – would come away "empty handed", according to YouGov's poll.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What did the commentators say?

For the Liberal Democrats, supplanting the SNP as the third-largest party in the House of Commons isn't simply "vanity and Westminster one-upmanship," said Freddie Hayward in The New Statesman. It comes with some "serious benefits", including the "top prize" of a guaranteed two questions at Prime Minister's Questions. 

This would be a valuable opportunity to regain credibility. If the party can tell a story of relevance and success, "the broadcasters and the papers might start giving them more coverage", plucking them from the relative obscurity they have resided in for more than a decade. 

While current modelling predicts the Conservatives will be the second-largest party, Nigel Farage's decision to "enter the fray" as leader and a parliamentary candidate of Reform UK is "threatening to eat further into the Conservative vote with an attack from the populist right", said Politico's Esther Webber. 

Some recent polling, said Sky News, suggested that Reform UK is close to overtaking the Conservatives. But while some commentators have suggested that Farage's party could "take over or even replace the Conservatives by the 2029 general election", said Will Prescott on UnHerd, "sadly for Farage, that appears very unlikely". 

Even if, as the very worst opinion polls for the Tories suggest, the Conservatives are reduced to third place in the Commons behind the Liberal Democrats, "they will still be comfortably the largest right-of-centre force in Parliament". And by Farage's own admission too, even if the Reform UK leader were to become MP for Clacton, it would be "very difficult to see Reform capturing more than a tiny number of seats" as the party's vote is "too evenly spread across the country". Despite winning 12% of the vote at the May local elections, the party picked up just two council seats. 

Nevertheless, Farage's re-entry into British politics is "a sign that he thinks something is up" and that he could "enjoy real success if he plays his cards right", said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. While Farage's decision to stand is a "symptom rather than a cause of how badly the Tory party is going to do at this election", it "could mean that this election isn't just a transfer of power from one of the UK's two big parties to another, but a wider reconfiguration of the British party system".

What next?

Ed Davey sought to maintain the Lib Dems' momentum today with the launch of the party manifesto, which includes a promise to "save the NHS". The manifesto, which Davey said is fully costed, pledges to recruit 8,000 more GPs, give unpaid carers a right to paid carers' leave from work, and introduce free personal care in England. 

Publicly, leading Conservatives have remained "bullish" about their election prospects. Andrew Bowie, an energy minister and Tory candidate, told Politico that he was "absolutely not" worried about Reform's impact on the Tories' electoral prospects, adding that Farage had "run, and lost, in a number of general elections gone by".

Others are not so optimistic. Former culture secretary Nadine Dorries told The News Agents podcast last week that the Tories will "probably disappear" at the next election if Reform continue their surge. "Given tactical voting, which is taking place already in many constituencies, and given the uprising in Reform's votes and support since Nigel Farage decided he would stand as leader, I think you could see the disappearance of the Conservative Party," she said.