Some lawmakers from UK prime minister Rishi Sunak's party are plotting to abandon their constituents in order to secure safer seats at the next UK general election, a report said. The Tory MPs are attempting to do so as they anticipate electoral losses after Rishi Sunak took over as UK PM following Liz Truss, Bloomberg reported.
In recent days, Tory MPs have been informing their local associations and party headquarters whether they intend to stand again at the next election. The polls are due before January 2025 and an unusually large number of Tory MPs are expected to quit, the report said.
The MPs seeking relatively safe seats are scrambling to save their jobs as the ones in marginal constituencies this week suggests little sense of optimism that Rishi Sunak will be able to turn around the party's poor poll rating in the next two years.
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The MPs who are trying to swap seats are doing so out of necessity because of boundary changes which means the regular alterations made to the borders of constituencies due to demographic and population changes. But the “chicken run”- as critics call it- is largely a panic move as the MPs wave goodbye to the people they were elected to represent, and run off to somewhere more politically convenient to save their own seats.
The process is cut-throat and full of confusion as MPs of Rishi Sunak's party are weighing up their futures and jostling for positions. As the current proposals by the boundary commission could see 59 existing parliamentary seats shift by 40% or more, many seats could look very different to how they did in 2019.
{{/usCountry}}The process is cut-throat and full of confusion as MPs of Rishi Sunak's party are weighing up their futures and jostling for positions. As the current proposals by the boundary commission could see 59 existing parliamentary seats shift by 40% or more, many seats could look very different to how they did in 2019.
{{/usCountry}}Some of the worst-affected MPs include Gavin Williamson, the former minister who resigned in the first weeks of Rishi Sunak's government and defense secretary Ben Wallace, the report said.