Senior Tories have rubbished Rishi Sunak’s claims that Labour is on course for a hung parliament and urged him to change his campaign strategy.

The Prime Minister has attracted criticism from Conservatives and pollsters alike following his claims that the local election results signalled Labour would fail to win enough seats to form a majority at the general election.

It forms part of No 10’s latest political strategy to warn voters that Sir Keir Starmer will be installed as Prime Minister by a rainbow coalition made up from the SNP, Liberal Democrats and Greens.

Ministers are instead urging Mr Sunak to keep talking about an improving economy and to hammer home the “vote Reform, get Labour” message.

The suggestion of a hung parliament was first made by psephologist Professor Michael Thrasher, who said the local election results, if replicated in a general election would leave Labour 32 seats short of a majority.

But pollsters have pointed out that the analysis assumes that voters will vote exactly the same way in the general election, that Labour’s performance would remain unchanged from the 2019 election in Scotland and Wales, and that it fails to take into account the impact on the Tories of Reform UK.

Mr Sunak reiterated the claims during a visit in central London yesterday, saying: “What the independent analysis shows is that, whilst of course, this was a disappointing weekend for us, the result of the next general election isn’t a foregone conclusion.

“And indeed, actually the situation is closer than many people are saying or indeed some of the opinion polls are predicting.”

Senior Tories have criticised the strategy, blaming it on CCHQ’s election guru Isaac Levido, who has been accused of trying to resurrect his former boss Lynton Crosby’s “coalition of chaos” campaign from 2015, which produced pictures of Ed Miliband inside the then SNP leader Alex Salmond’s top pocket.

A former Cabinet minister told i: “I don’t buy it at all. I suspect this is Isaac trying to set up a campaign with the attack line about Starmer being propped up by [SNP leader John] Swinney as Lynton did with Miliband and Salmond. But life has moved on.”

Former No 10 chief of staff Lord Barwell also lambasted the campaign plan, stating that while “Labour didn’t do as well in [the] locals as in Blackpool South … Tories shouldn’t take too much comfort from that”.

Other pollsters have also cautioned against trying to use the local election results to extrapolate how the general election will turn out.

Ben Page, a pollster for Ipsos Mori, told Times Radio: “I think it’s for the birds, to be honest, at the moment. If you look at the swing in Blackpool South, 30 per cent or so, you look at these local election results, which we haven’t seen anything of this kind since just before Labour won a landslide in 1997.”

Polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice was equally dismissive about using local elections to predict Westminster seats. “It’s quite long been the case, certainly since the late 1980s, that the way that people vote in local elections doesn’t necessarily exactly mirror the way that they would vote in a general election,” he told the BBC.

Ministers are instead urging Mr Sunak to hammer home the message that voters, by backing Reform UK, will end up handing the keys to Downing Street to Sir Keir Starmer.

一位部长表示，蒂斯谷市长本·侯臣(Ben Houchen)的结果给了该党希望，同时指出，工党的选票份额表明，它并没有“彻底击败对手”。

他们表示:“他们所处的改革投票引发了一些担忧，所以我们确实需要发出‘投票改革，支持工党’的信息。”

大多数政府内部人士认为，只有迅速改善的经济才能对该党的获胜机会产生重大影响。

一名保守党助手说:“卢旺达计划可能会有所不同，并赢回一些选民，但它会为我们赢得选举吗?”不。这一切都归结于经济。”