The 'death knell' sounded for the Conservative Party long before the UK election, polling guru says

LONDON — After 14 years in power, the U.K.'s ruling Conservative Party looks to be standing on the brink of a momentous electoral defeat in the July 4 vote.

In the last few days leading up to the election, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has tried to put a brave face on his party's poor showing in the polls — which point to a mammoth win for the rival Labour Party — by saying the result was not a "forgone conclusion."

While there's bound to be a reckoning after the election, and some serious soul searching as to where things went wrong, political analysts tend to agree there was not much that Sunak could have done to repair serious damage done by previous leaders in recent years.

John Curtice, one of the U.K.'s most highly-regarded polling experts, put the party's demise down to two irreparably damaging events in recent years.

"This is not an election about the ideological position of the parties, this is an election about competence," Curtice told CNBC in the run-up to the vote.

"The reason why we are where we are, is because the Conservatives were dealt a bad hand, but they played it badly."

Curtice said 'Partygate,' the revelation that government officials broke social gathering rules during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the short-lived Liz Truss government of 2022, whose ill-fated economic policies caused market panic, were the origins of the party's downfall.

"These are the two defining events [of the election], and everything else is variation and embellishment," noted Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research.

"No government that has presided over a market crisis has survived in the ballot box. It is a death knell," he added.

"And