Senior Tories warned they could easily lose their seats in election

Senior Tories including the former chairman David Davis risk losing their seats at the next election to Liberal Democrats, the Conservative leadership has been warned.

In a bleak analysis of the party's electoral health, Andrew Tyrie, the Tory MP for Chichester, calculated that the party could lose another 41 of its 166 seats if it suffers a swing as small as 1 per cent.

The warning came as the Liberal Democrats revealed plans for an electoral push against Mr Davis, the favourite to succeed Iain Duncan Smith as leader if the Conservatives suffer another election rout, in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency in Yorkshire.

The party cut Mr Davis's majority from 7,514 to 1,903 votes in June last year and has selected his constituency as one of its top six targets.

Liberal Democrats from all over Yorkshire are supplementing local activists in an effort to cultivate support by relentlessly leafleting the people of Haltemprice and Howden. They also hope to exploit the party infighting triggered by the demotion in July of Mr Davis from the party's chairmanship to shadowing the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.

The Liberal Democrats are also pouring resources into Maidenhead, the seat held by Theresa May, the current Tory party chairman, whose majority collapsed from 11,981 to 3,284 last year.

A spokesman for the Liberal Democrats said: "The Tories could well find themselves facing a leadership election but with some of the leading candidates out of Parliament."

According to Mr Tyrie's figures, a 2 per cent swing could cut the party to 115 MPs while a 5 per cent swing would leave them with just 92 MPs. He warned in a pamphlet: "The Conservatives may not just be in a hole. We may be on the ledge of a deeper pit."

His study warned that the Tories needed a poll lead of 11.5 points over Labour to secure an overall majority at the next general election.

But he found that Labour performed best in its most marginal constituencies and warned that the Tories faced fierce opposition from Liberal Democrats even in the remaining seats. In all, 58 of the 166 Conservative seats have the Liberal Democrats in second place.

He warned that local constituency work by the Liberal Democrats was being noticed by voters, and said the party was making ground among the young, with support among the under-45s just 5 percentage points behind the Conservatives, compared with a 10-point gap in 1997.