Supermarket weep: How Sunak’s Morrisons trip in Cameron’s old seat was a hard sell

If Rishi Sunak needed reminding of how much trouble his Conservative Party is in during this election campaign, he would have needed to look no further than the Morrisons in Witney.

During a campaign trip to the Oxfordshire seat, where he visited the supermarket with the local Tory candidate Robert Courts, a member of the public was told the Prime Minister was standing at the bakery.

“I’ll be sure to go the other way then,” the man said.

Asked if he was unlikely to vote Tory on Thursday, he sniffed: “Not after what they’ve done to the country. I’ve voted Tory all my life. Not any more. I’m voting Reform.”

While he may be voting for Reform, the bigger threat in the area is from the Liberal Democrats, who believe they could be within touching distance of winning each of the Tory-held Oxfordshire seats come Thursday.

But the fact that voters in the previously true blue seat once held by former prime minister Lord Cameron are deserting the party in different directions is a source of serious concern for activists.

According to one of Mr Courts’s campaigners, the Tory candidate for Witney is “anxious” about the election despite sitting on a near 16,000 majority, adding that his Lib Dem rival is “really pushing the tactical vote”.

When the Lib Dem candidate’s name Charlie Maynard was uttered, the activist snapped: “Don’t mention his name!”

The very fact Mr Sunak has spent the last few days campaigning deep in the Tory heartlands speaks volumes of how CCHQ believes the election will turn out. But despite staring at a heavy defeat come polling day, the Prime Minister remained upbeat and insisted he would not stop campaigning for people’s votes until the polls closed at 10pm on Thursday.

In a demonstration of his willingness to go the extra mile, and perhaps a nod towards his older Labour counterpart, Mr Sunak was up to catch the campaign bus at 3am, visiting an Ocado distribution centre in Luton.

The Prime Minister and his team were quick to pounce on Sir Keir Starmer’s suggestion that he would try to keep his Friday evenings free to spend time with his family should he enter Downing Street.

It was immediately used against him by CCHQ, with Defence Secretary Grant Shapps claiming the Sir Keir would put the security of the nation at risk by finishing work at 6pm on a weekend, while health minister Maria Caulfield incorrectly claimed the Labour leader was planning on working a four day week.

But in showing no sign of letting up, Mr Sunak refused to distance himself from the claims, insisting: “I do worry about our security under Keir Starmer. I have deep concerns about it.”

The claims have been dismissed as “desperate” by the Labour camp, but the refusal to disown the comments and to double down on his accusation that a Labour government would be welcomed by the UK’s adversaries, such as Vladimir Putin, showed the Tory leader was willing to throw the kitchen sink at his final few days of campaigning.

Speaking to reporters during a visit to a cosmetics warehouse in Banbury, Mr Sunak insisted the outcome of the General Election is not a “foregone conclusion”.

He said the Tory campaign had done “a good job of shining a spotlight on what Labour would mean for people’s taxes”.

Read Next

What Keir Starmer actually said about his working hours

NewsFact Check

What Keir Starmer actually said about his working hours

Read More

But when it was put to him by i that a party hoping to win the election should be fighting for votes in the Red Wall and not spending the last remaining hours of the campaign within the Tory shires, he replied: “I don’t take any vote for granted.

“That’s the way I’ve always approached this. Why would I have got up at four this morning? I’m fighting for every vote, right?”

He added: “Until the polls close, I will keep going, fighting for every vote. I mean, it would be very wrong not to.”

And it looks like he will have to. Even in Stratford-upon-Avon, a seat that has through its various guises remained Tory since 1906 except for a brief hiatus in the mid-1990s following Alan Howarth’s defection from the Conservatives to Labour, the party has a fight on its hands.

According to YouGov’s MRP poll, the seat could fall to the Lib Dems. During a visit on Monday, the Prime Minister pressed the flesh and spoke to staff during a visit to the Cotswolds Distillery, an upmarket artisan whisky and gin maker set among the rolling fields of rural Warwickshire.

But even here, amid the Farrow and Ball painted homes and shiny new Range Rovers, the voters were undecided about backing the Tories.

Mr Sunak, however, was adamant that he would keep pushing on. “In spite of all the obvious things that you might look at and say it’s tough, fundamentally, if you’re fighting for what you believe in, then that gives you the strength and resilience to just crack on with it.”