The Conservatives have opened a five-point lead over Reform UK in a new poll, the biggest gap between the two main parties of the right since 2024.
The More in Common survey of 2,013 people put Kemi Badenoch’s party on 25%, up two points on the previous week. Reform was on 20%, down two points and its lowest score with the pollster in two years.
Labour led on 28%, with the Liberal Democrats on 9%, the Greens on 7% and Restore Britain on 6%.
On Monday, the Conservatives also moved ahead of Reform in the Telegraph’s poll tracker, which averages approved polls, for the first time in almost two years.
Other recent polls show a tighter race. A YouGov poll of 2,437 adults, carried out on 8 and 9 November, put the Conservatives on 21% and Reform on 20%, both down on the previous week.
The same poll had Labour on 27%, giving it a six-point lead, its biggest since YouGov’s tracker restarted in January 2025. The Lib Dems were on 12% and the Greens on 10%.
A Deltapoll survey published on Monday night went the other way, putting Reform four points ahead of the Tories.
Across October, Labour averaged 29.7%, Reform 22.1% and the Conservatives 21.5%, according to an analysis of polls from 10 companies by the Electoral Reform Society.
Luke Tryl, UK director of More in Common, said the “volatile nature of UK politics since the election” had taken another turn this week.
He said the “Burnham bounce” was keeping Labour ahead. But with only three points between the two traditional main parties, he added, “a snap election in the spring wouldn’t, on these numbers, be an appealing prospect”.
The combined Labour and Conservative share of 53% in the More in Common poll is the highest since the end of 2024. In October, more than half of voters (51.2%) said they would back one of the two biggest parties, for the first time since the Electoral Reform Society began compiling its averages in February 2025.
But Tryl said it was “far too early to say this is a return to two-party politics”.
At the 2024 general election, Labour and the Conservatives won a combined 59% of the vote in Great Britain, their lowest share since the 1920s. Current polling is still below even that.
Reform led the polls for much of 2025. It overtook the Conservatives in January that year, a month after its membership passed the Tories’, and made big gains at the 2025 local elections. By September 2025 its average lead stood at 13 points.
Labour moved back in front over the summer after Andy Burnham succeeded Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister, and the Conservatives first overtook Reform in a More in Common poll in September.
Nigel Farage is under investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, over two alleged breaches of the rules. They relate to claims that he did not properly declare a £5m donation from Christopher Harborne, a Thai-based billionaire, or gifts and payments from his long-term aide George Cottrell in the year before he was elected as an MP.
Farage denies any wrongdoing and says he needs the £5m to pay for his personal security.
He has also admitted that Reform has lost support to Restore Britain, the party set up by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe.
Badenoch had a difficult start as leader of the opposition after succeeding Rishi Sunak in late 2024, as Reform won over Conservative defectors and voters in traditionally Tory areas.
Her October 2025 party conference speech, in which she pledged to abolish stamp duty, was widely seen as a turning point.
She has since apologised for her party’s past failings on migration and net zero, pledged to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights, and promised to scrap legally binding climate targets.