Over lunch last week, a Conservative veteran parliamentarian of long experience briefly, but brutally summed up the current predicament of his party.
“We’re totally and utterly f***ed!” he said, adding: “I can tell you my family all plan to vote Reform UK.”
An hour later a Conservative Red Wall MP was sharing similar sentiments over a cup of tea.
“I just don’t see how we can turn it around.”
The gloom and despondency among scores of Conservative MPs is very real.
Yet this was after a fortnight of two major events – first a reshuffle and then this week’s Autumn Statement – which were supposed to launch the fightback.
The poll results, which were already bad, tell us a different story.
The Techne UK findings for Express.co.uk over the last two weeks have shown that remarkably the Conservatives have lost even more ground to Labour as a result of Mr Sunak’s attempts to turn things around.
The reshuffle week saw Labour’s lead increase from 21 points to 24 points and then this week in the polling taken after the Autumn Statement it went up another point to 25.
So, despite the protection of the triple lock on pensions, the National Insurance contributions cut, help for businesses and self-employed, the Tories actually lost more ground from an already awful position.
This is not the first time that events which should boost poll ratings have had the opposite effect recently.
After Rishi Sunak’s conference speech in October (normally something which would give a party at least two points more) the Tories lost a percentage point in the poll.
One Tory MP suggested that the party cannot do anything because it “is locked in a death spiral” since the ousting of Boris Johnson.
The underlying figures of the poll tells an even gloomier story.
Despite protecting the triple lock on the state pension, the 64-and-older category (always the strongest for the Conservatives) now favours Labour by 40 percent to 27 percent.
In fact, there is not an age group or socio-economic group where Labour does not lead.
Most worrying though is that of the people who voted Conservative in 2019, less than one in four (39 percent) plan to vote for them in the next election.
Even if the 10 percent of undecided voters all switched to the Tories, then they would still have their worst result in their 345-year history.
The situation is not helped by the factionalism and infighting or the uncertainty now about Sunak’s future.
Meetings have been going on for the last fortnight among Tory MPs who want to try to remove him and install someone like the sacked ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
That threat looks likely to carry on into January and could unleash more turmoil.
But the real question is when Sunak will call a general election. Some suggested he has opened the door to May, but the poll ratings are so bad it seems unlikely.
The other options are September/ October next year or the last possible day in late January 2025, currently the favourite in many Westminster circles.
But that comes with a warning too which emphasises how difficult the choices ahead are for Mr Sunak.
A former cabinet minister told the Daily Express: “Jim Callaghan (1979), John Major (1992) and Gordon Brown (1997) all made the same mistake of going at the last possible day.
“As a result, they all lost more than they would have done because they did not have the nerve to go earlier.
“If we leave it until the minute then the election will not just be about ‘change’, it will be ‘Tories out’.
“Change elections means we can save more seats because our voters stay at home, Tories out means a lot of tactical voting from our own voters to get us out of government. It would be a disaster.”
