THE Conservative MP for Lewes is predicted to lose her seat to the resurgent Liberal Democrats at the next General Election, in a new poll of key Tory marginals.

Maria Caulfield, who first won Lewes against long-standing Lib Dem MP Norman Baker in 2015, retained her seat in the 2017 election with a majority of 5,508 (1.02 per cent).

But the new You Gov poll suggests the Lib Dems will once again take the seat at the next election by a majority of nearly six percent.

The You Gov poll questioned 1,200 voters in 20 key constituencies, shows that Boris Johnson faces losing more than half of them to the Lib Dems, including Lewes.

The polling covered constituencies with the smallest Conservative majorities where the Liberal Democrats came second in 2017.

It shows:

• A 14.1 per cent slump in Conservative support and an overall swing of more than 8% to the Liberal Democrats, compared to the 2017 election.

• The swing to the Liberal Democrats increases further if Boris Johnson campaigns for a No Deal Brexit, but the most worrying results for Downing Street come in response to two further questions.

• When voters are asked what they would do in the hypothetical situation where their local Conservative MP stood as an independent anti-No Deal candidate, the party’s official candidate would be defeated by the Liberal Democrats in all but three of the 20 seats surveyed.

• If other parties opposed to No Deal united on a single platform, the Conservatives would be defeated in 13 out of 20 seats.

Asked if there was a General election tomorrow, the survey shows that just 70 per cent of 2017 Conservative voters plan to vote for the party and that a third of these lost votes would go to the Liberal Democrats, with many others defecting to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.