UK PM Sunak forecast to lose his parliamentary seat, Savanta poll shows

LONDON (Reuters) -Rishi Sunak is forecast to become the first sitting British prime minister to lose their own parliamentary seat at an election, a Savanta opinion poll published by the Telegraph newspaper ahead of the July 4 national vote showed.

Savanta polled around 18,000 people between June 7 and June 18.

The polling showed Sunak’s Conservatives on track to be left with just 53 seats in Britain’s 650-member House of Commons, with the opposition Labour Party forecast to win 516.

Most opinion polls currently place Keir Starmer’s Labour about 20 percentage points ahead of the governing Conservatives in the national vote share.

Despite forecasting Sunak would lose his parliamentary constituency in northern England, once considered a safe Conservative seat, Savanta said the contest was still in the balance given the close margins, the Telegraph reported.

More than 100 such seats are predicted by Savanta to be won by such narrow margins that they remain up for grabs, it said.

(Reporting by Kylie MacLellan, Writing by Sachin Ravikumar; editing by William James)