NEW polling shows Herefordshire’s two Conservative MPs comfortably holding onto their seats at the General Election expected later this year – even as the majority of their party colleagues lose theirs.

The poll published this week by YouGov shows Sir Bill Wiggin comfortably retaining his North Herefordshire seat with 37 per cent of the vote – helped by a four-way split between Labour (21 per cent), the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK (both 14 per cent) and Greens (13 per cent).

Sir Bill, who lives in his constituency in Upton Bishop, three miles from Ross-on-Wye, is defending a majority of nearly 25,000 from the last general election in 2019.

He has confirmed he is re-standing and will again face Dr Ellie Chowns of the Green Party, which is targeting the seat, along with Cat Hornsey of the LibDems and Andrew Dye for Reform UK.

In Hereford and South Herefordshire, which includes Ross-on-Wye, YouGov puts the incumbent Jesse Norman on 34 per cent for the Conservatives, just five percentage points above Labour on 29 per cent.

Here Mr Norman will face Dan Powell for the LibDems, Diana Toynbee for the Greens and Nigel Ely for Reform.

But despite polling second in both Herefordshire constituencies, the Labour Party have yet to announce its candidates for either.

Indeed the party put them both among 211 “non-battleground” seats in an internal list published last December.

YouGov’s poll gives Labour 403 seats nationally, almost doubling its tally of 202 at the 2019 election, while the Conservatives are forecast to slump from 365 last time to 155 – a result comparable to Tony Blair’s landslide victory for Labour back in 1997.

It shows that seats currently held by Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt, and housing and communities secretary Michael Gove could all change hands at the next election, expected in autumn.

Based on 18,761 interviews last month, the UK-wide poll employs a statistical technique called multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) which is claimed to better map the poll sample onto individual areas.