The Liberal Democrats are now the bookies’ favourite to win in the Conservative stronghold of North Shropshire in Thursday’s by-election, according to reports, following weeks of allegations that Boris Johnson’s government had broken lockdown rules last winter while the rest of Britain was forced to cancel Christmas gatherings.

The North Shropshire seat, left empty after the resignation of Conservative Brexiteer Owen Paterson over alleged lobbying, had been in the hands of the Tories for all but two of the last 190 years. While having gained close to a 23,000 seat majority in the December 2019 General Election, the Liberal Democrats, which two years ago had finished third with just 10 per cent of the vote, is now the bookmakers’ favourite to claim the seat this week.

The Guardian reports that bookies now have Liberal Democrat candidate Helen Morgan as the favourite at around 1/2, while the odds for Conservative candidate Neil Shastri-Hurst have lengthened to 6/4.

While according to internal Lib Dem polling reported by The Times, the left-wing party is now in a dead heat race with the Conservatives.

The Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper also claimed that while campaigning in North Shropshire last weekend, she had observed that support for the Conservatives “has collapsed”.

“We are now neck and neck with the Conservatives and our campaigners are flooding into the constituency from across the country,” Ms Cooper alleged.

However, a senior Liberal Democrat source has told The Times: “We certainly don’t consider ourselves favourites. It’s more likely we’ll come a close second.”

Even if the Conservatives hold the seat, winning with the Lib Dems in a “close second” would still represent a blow to Boris Johnson’s authority, when just two years ago, he swept the country, taking seats in Labour strongholds in the biggest victory for the Conservatives since the Thatcher era.

The reports come during a succession of alleged scandals and criticisms for Boris Johnson and his administration, after reports that Downing Street and other government departments had had several parties last winter, despite the laws stipulating that public gatherings were banned, consequently resulting in many Britons cancelling their Christmas plans.

Johnson has also been accused of misleading officials over the cost of refurbishing his Downing Street apartment after the Electoral Commission fined the Conservatives nearly £18,000 for failing to accurately report a donation used to pay for the redecoration.

Further, the prime minister faced a massive rebellion from within his own party over the vote to trigger Plan B measures, including widening the mask mandate, encouraging people to work from home, and introducing for the first time in England domestic Covid passports. Mr Johnson has also faced massive criticism when last week he suggested that in the future the country will have to have a “conversation” about mandatory vaccination.

Speaking on the impending by-election, Ben Harris-Quinney, chairman of the UK’s oldest conservative think tank The Bow Group, told Breitbart London that while it was impossible to know the outcome, he predicted that in the event of a Conservative win, there will be a significantly-reduced majority, with a new MP “very unlikely” to be a real conservative.

The Bow Group chairman added that there only remains a shrinking number of “solid conservatives” in the Conservative Party who are “the only genuine opposition this country has left”.

Mr Harris-Quinney told this publication: “Owen Paterson was a backbench rebel, but due to the Conservative Party screening out real conservatives as candidates since 2005, his replacement is very unlikely to be.

“During Owen Paterson’s time in Parliament, the Conservative Party has ceased to be conservative, and I think people are waking up to that and to the rank hypocrisy that now runs through the party’s core. It’s impossible to know what the result will be on Thursday, but I predict the Conservative majority will be significantly reduced and the vote for a combination of Reform, Reclaim, and UKIP will be higher than we have seen in a long time.

“What it underlines is the necessity for the right to unite around one party so that party can start to place real pressure on the Conservatives, as UKIP did in 2014 and leading up to the Brexit vote.”