Do you remember the scene in the movie Titanic when the passengers finally realise they are doomed? They know the situation is dire. The ship is dead in the water. The lifeboats have all gone. Yet hope is still alive that something – a nearby liner perhaps – will rescue them. It doesn’t happen. Then the bow dips beneath the waves, the stern rises from the water, and the ship tilts vertiginously. Their mood goes swiftly from anxious fear to flat panic as the reality hits that nothing is going to save them and there is nothing they can do about it.

In Britain, the Conservative government experienced that moment last week.

Voters will depose Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the oncoming election if his own party doesn’t get in first.Credit: Darren Staples – WPA Pool/Getty Images

It came when The Sunday Times published a poll even more devastating than the Tories’ worst fears. This wasn’t just any opinion poll: conducted by the highly reputable pollster MRP, it had an enormous sample size – 15,000 – with a very small margin of error. It showed Labour winning 438 seats to the Tories’ 98.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak heads the list of senior cabinet ministers now on the precipice of losing once ultra-safe constituencies.

When I was in the UK in February, the question most commonly debated by crystal ball-gazing Tories was whether, after the election, their numbers in the Commons would have a “1” or a “2″ in front. Nobody expected it to be a “9”.

Were those figures to be repeated at the general election this year, it would be the Conservative Party’s worst-ever result in its 200-year history. As well as a shattering defeat, it would mean the likelihood of at least a decade of Labour government, probably longer.

Of the many reasons for the Tories’ more-calamitous-than-expected position, not least has been the total failure of the Sunak experiment. After he replaced Liz Truss 18 months ago, the expectation was that he would steady the ship; his much-vaunted reputation for competence would revive the government’s fortunes. It hasn’t worked.

Sunak connects neither with the Tory rank and file nor the general public. To the party faithful, he is the leader whose big policy idea was to copy Jacinda Ardern’s plan to ban smoking – about as nanny state as it gets. To the masses, he’s the guy who married into a billionaire Indian dynasty, wears Prada shoes, and once boasted (admittedly when an undergraduate) that he’d never met any working-class people.