Labour’s election candidate in Keighley says a new national poll suggesting a massive swing to the Conservatives “reflects the feeling” the Party’s campaigners are picking up locally.

Keighley is among a number of Labour heartland seats across the country tipped to go Tory in the upcoming election.

A poll which correctly forecast the result of the 2017 election flags up a number of potential Conservative gains in West Yorkshire, including Dewsbury, Wakefield and the Colne Valley.

And John Grogan, who won the Keighley seat for Labour in 2017 with a majority of 249, said: “I think the poll reflects the feeling we are picking up locally.

“Five times since the war, the majority has been less than 1,000 in Keighley,” said Mr Grogan. “When I first knocked on doors here in the general election of 1979, Labour’s Bob Cryer won by 79 votes. It could well be every bit as close this time.”

Mr Grogan appealed to Liberal Democrats supporters in particular to ‘lend me their vote’.

The Lib Dem’s Keighley hopeful, Tom Franks, disagreed saying ‘there is everything to play for’.

He said: “It is not clear to me that there is a very strong swing to the Conservatives in Keighley. There is everything to play for here.

“It is very important that we have a Lib-Dem standing in Keighley although it is by no means clear to me where the bulk of my votes will come from.

“We have had some people saying we should not be standing in Keighley with the implication that this might damage John Grogan’s chances. I don’t hold with that.”

Mr Franks said his campaign was going well.

Brexit Party candidate Waqas Ali Khan thinks Keighley will be ‘one to watch on polling day’.

Mr Khan said: “This is such a marginal seat that anything is possible. I believe we can win by picking up disenfranchised voters from the two main parties.

“We are not standing in 376 out of 650 seats to give a competitive advantage to the Conservatives party to win a majority and we plead with voters to recognise this sacrifice and get behind us. We cannot make changes from the outside.”

Keighley’s Conservative candidate Robbie Moore was also asked to comment on the YouGov poll.

The survey indicates that if the election was held now, the Tories would win 359 seats - 42 more than they took in 2017 and translating to a 68-seat majority.

Meanwhile, it indicates Labour could lose 51 seats to a total of 211 with 32 per cent of the vote - the party’s worst performance in seats won since 1983.

YouGov used the same method in the 2017 general election, when it accurately predicted the results in 93 per cent of constituencies and pointed towards a hung Parliament. Chris Curtis, political research manager at YouGov, said the current analysis shows the Tories have a “comfortable majority”, with seats coming their way at the expense of Labour in the North and Midlands.

Baroness Warsi of Dewsbury, a former Conservative Chair, said the findings were ‘good news and bad news for the Tories’. “Good news because I think secretly we’ll be quite confident that this is exactly where we needed to be at this stage, and so far the election campaign has gone to plan,” she told a TV programme.