Johnson leads polls as election enters final days

LONDON: Prime Minister Boris Johnson goes into the final days of the UK’s election campaign returning to his key message: that only he can deliver Brexit.

Polls show his Conservative Party on course to win a majority, which would mean Parliament voting to leave the European Union by Jan. 31. But in the 2017 election, those polls were wrong, and Johnson will urge supporters not to be complacent.

On Monday, the prime minister is visiting Sunderland in Northeast England, one of the first places to declare in favor of leaving the European Union on the night of the 2016 referendum.


He’ll say that vote has been frustrated by members of parliament with “dither and delay, prevarication and procrastination, obfuscation and obstruction,” according to his office.

Johnson himself was part of that parliament and a leader of the Conservative rebellion that stopped Britain from leaving the EU in March. But the signs are that voters aren’t going to punish him for this in Thursday’s election. Polls in the Sunday newspapers all put the Conservatives in the lead. There were some signs that Corbyn’s opposition Labour Party was closing the gap, but not by enough yet to keep the Conservatives out of power.