Five-point Tory poll slump gives Labour its first lead since January 

Backing for the Tories among voters has fallen to its lowest level since the 2019 General Election after MPs lined up to support Boris Johnson's manifesto-busting £12billion tax raid, according to a YouGov poll.

Conservative support plummeted five points to 33 per cent while Labour's share increased by one point to 35 per cent, putting Sir Keir Starmer's party ahead of the Tories for the first time since January.

Six in ten voters said they did not believe Mr Johnson or the Conservatives cared about keeping taxes low compared with around two in ten who believed that they do care, The Times reported. 

The poll also found that more than three-quarters of all Tory voters believe the party does not support low taxation, while one per cent voters think the plans to fund an overhaul of social care will leave them better off.

The YouGov survey suggests the Government's plans to hike National Insurance and increase dividend taxes, apparently to plug a funding shortfall in the NHS and properly finance social care, has backfired among voters.   

The result are likely to set alarm bells off among Tory MPs and in Downing Street ahead of the party conference next month.  

Anthony Wells, political research director at YouGov, said: 'It looks as if the Government may have sacrificed their reputation for low taxes amongst Tory voters without actually getting much credit for helping the NHS.'

Tories on the Right of the party had expressed fears that the Prime Minister's massive £12billion tax raid will simply be swallowed up after just five MPs rebelled against the plans.

Mr Johnson's dramatic move to bail out the NHS and overhaul social care with an eye-watering hike in national insurance sailed through the Commons by 319 to 248. Threats of a major Conservative revolt melted away after Downing Street hinted at a reshuffle and made some minor tweaks to the policy. 

In the end only Esther McVey, John Redwood, Christopher Chope, Philip Davies and Neil Hudson opposed the government. Another 37 Tories did not vote, including a number of 'Red Wall' MPs who have been deeply concerned about the proposals. 

The Government's working majority of more than 80 was barely trimmed to 71 even though Cabinet ministers and many MPs have been privately alarmed that Mr Johnson is abandoning a manifesto promise and taking the tax burden to record peacetime levels.

Former Cabinet minister Sir John Redwood said today that he had received no satisfactory guarantees that the extra money would get results. The NHS will get £10billion a year of the revenue raised for the next three years, with an £86,000 cap on social care costs coming in from October 2023.  

'Yesterday I asked the government what reduction in waiting lists would we get for the extra tax money for the NHS?' he said.  'They said they could make no promises on reducing waits so I voted against the tax. The current NHS budget is more than the total income tax revenue.' 

Tory peer Lord Lilley told LBC: 'It was a mistake to introduce a permanent tax rise to deal with a temporary problem, the backlog, and to try and deal with some problem of potentially catastrophic costs of social care by taxation, rather than bringing in an insurance option for people if they wanted to avoid that.

'So I think it's a double mistake from that point of view'. 

Fresh doubts were raised today after it emerged that the NHS has been recruiting managers on salaries of more than £200,000 a year.  

In a round of interviews care minister Helen Whately said the Government had made 'difficult choices' and stressed it will be keeping a 'really close eye' on how extra funding is spent by the NHS, .

'People working in the NHS in those kinds of roles are taking on a lot of responsibility, they're big jobs, and they're moving from having more senior managers in the NHS to fewer through doing this, the NHS reckons that it needs to have that level of pay to have the right people in those jobs,' she told Sky News.

'But I do think the Government keeps a really close eye on making sure that NHS money is spent carefully and appropriately because we want as much of the funding as possible to go to the front line.' 

In the Commons debate, the leader of the Northern Research Group of Tory MPs, Jake Berry, warned that by listing the levy on people's payslips as a health and social care charge, it would 'never go down, it can only go up'.

'No party is ever going to stand at an election and say I've got a good idea, vote for me, I'll cut the NHS tax,' he said.

'It is fundamentally un-Conservative and in the long term it will massively damage the prospects of our party because we will never outbid the Labour Party in the arms race of an NHS tax.'

Former minister Steve Baker said the party was facing a 'generational crisis' due to its inability to fund promises dating back more than a century.

'Now the Conservative Party, at some stage in our lifetimes, is going to have to rediscover what it stands for because I have to say at the moment we keep doing things we hate, because we feel we must,' he said.