Tories risk losing seats in European and local elections, says leading pollster

A pollster who advised the Tories at their recent "away day" has warned that Iain Duncan Smith could preside over the loss of two European seats and up to 100 councillors next year.

Peter Kellner, the chairman of YouGov.com, said that the losses would occur if the party repeated its 35 per cent share of the vote in last week's local elections.

His warning came as William Hague said publicly for the first time that he was prepared to lead the Conservatives again and David Mellor, a former minister, revealed that he had quit the party.

Mr Kellner, whose company was the only one to predict the local election result accurately, gave a speech on polling data to 127 Tory MPs at their meeting in Buckinghamshire at the weekend.

Mr Kellner told the MPs that the party had to recognise that electorates were very volatile and traditional party loyalties were less strong in modern elections.

He said that instead of concentrating on the "core vote", Conservatives should look at how they could avoid offending other groups and then go on to try to attract them.

However, in a separate analysis, which was not presented to the MPs, he warned that Mr Duncan Smith could run into trouble in next year's European Parliament and local elections.

The Conservatives under the leadership of William Hague won 38 per cent of the vote in the 2000 local elections, to Labour's 29 per cent. In the 1999 European elections, the party won 36 seats on a 36 per cent of the vote.

However, because the Tories will be defending such a high baseline next year, they could lose "one or two Euro seats and up to 100 councillors" if they repeated this month's election performance, he said.

Mr Kellner said that "the grim truth" for the Leader of the Conservative Party was that the results would be a huge presentational problem. "If his party ends up losing more seats than it gains, he will appear to be doing even worse than Hague, who proceeded to lose the 2001 election disastrously," he said.

Mr Hague broke his silence on his own leadership ambitions yesterday when he made clear that he would consider a return to the top job at some point in the future.

He told BBC's Breakfast with Frost that he was not prepared to come back in "a few years' time" but refused to rule out the idea altogether. "Ask me what I will be doing in 20 years' time, I don't know, and I won't rule anything out. Who knows what will happen in politics decades ahead," Mr Hague said.

Mr Mellor made a vitriolic attack on Mr Duncan Smith, claiming the leader was "devoid of any real personal distinction whatsoever and that is obvious to the public".