(Bloomberg) — Foreign Secretary David Cameron said UK voters had not yet decided to abandon Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, despite the party trailing Labour by about 20 percentage points in opinion polls ahead of a general election expected in the second half of 2024.

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Cameron, who served as Britain’s prime minister from 2010 to 2016 and was brought back into the cabinet by Sunak in November, likened the governing party’s current position with that in the lead-up to the 2015 general election.

In 2013-2014, “we were way behind in the polls, everyone had written us off, they were saying: ‘start thinking about packing your bags’,” Cameron told Bloomberg TV in Davos, Switzerland, “We won that 2015 election and we won it because we had a strong team with a clear plan,” he said, adding that he believed Sunak’s government shared those attributes.

Cameron’s view belies evidence in a YouGov poll on Monday that suggests the Conservatives are heading for an electoral wipe-out on the scale of their 1997 landslide defeat by Labour, as support for the Tories leeches to the right-wing fringe party Reform UK. Nonetheless the survey was dismissed by Tory strategist Isaac Levido as “just another poll” while Labour leader Keir Starmer told his party to abandon complacency and “ignore that poll.”

While all recent major opinion surveys predict a win for Labour, Sunak could prevent Starmer from winning an outright parliamentary majority if the Tories can claw back just six points in the polls from voters who would have otherwise stayed at home or supported one of the UK’s minor political parties, according to data published by research consultancy Stonehaven late last year.

In the Bloomberg interview Cameron also suggested stepping up sanctions against the Iranian regime if Houthi attacks in the Red Sea continue. Houthi rebels have been targeting vessels for weeks, saying it’s in response to Israel’s war with Hamas.

“I think what we need to look at his all the tools that we have in the toolbox and obviously we have been using, for instance, sanctions against a number of people in Iran and we need to look at how we can step that up if this behavior continues,” Cameron said.

–With assistance from Annmarie Hordern, Jonathan Ferro and Lisa Abramowicz.

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