Following the 2019 General Election, the Conservatives were returned to office with a Parliamentary majority of 80 and a working majority of 87 (once the Speaker of the House and the Sinn Fein MPs are excluded since they don't vote).

Since that election, their majority has been chipped away in three main ways:

• The Tories have lost a number of by-elections, most recently the Blackpool South by-election where they lost the seat to Labour

• The Tories have suffered a number of defections where their MPs have quit the party to sit as independents or to sit as Labour MPs (or, in one case, to sit as a Reform UK MP)

• The Tories have been forced to suspend or expel MPs. Those MPs have sat as independents and have had varied records of voting with the government.

Since last week's defection by Dan Poulter, last week's Labour win in Blackpool South and today's defection by Natalie Elphicke, the government's working majority is down to just 45.

How much lower will it fall?

The source of truth for this market is the UK Parliament's "state of the parties" page here:

https://members.parliament.uk/parties/commons

I will treat that page as the absolute source of truth rather than making any subjective judgements unless the page is obviously temporarily wrong due to a hack, typo, etc.

Each option in this market will be resolved to YES if the working majority falls below that number. When Parliament is dissolved for a general election, the remaining options will be resolved to NO.