A sodden Sunak returns inside 10 Downing Street after announcing a general election today.Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
There are apparently rational reasons why Rishi Sunak called an election. But before he is anything else the UK’s prime minister is a dogmatic and entitled man, and men like that tend to be driven by ego rather than evidence-based thought.
Despairing Conservative politicians are astonished by his decision to go early. Different polling companies make different assumptions, but every polling company has the Tories heading for defeat, and more often than not a wipeout.
Sunak is undoubtedly privileged – Winchester, Oxford, Stanford, Goldman Sachs, marriage to one of the richest women in the country, prime minister a mere seven years after becoming an MP.
But he is also far more dogmatic than most voters understand. Sunak supported Brexit in 2016, for instance, when the smart career move appeared to be to back “remain”. The combination of dogma and privilege leads to massive overconfidence: an impatient belief, clearly visible in Sunak’s manner, that the benighted public should jolly well shape up and give him the acclaim he so richly deserves.
So on one month’s good inflation figures he thinks he can go to the country and the voters, who currently have the Tories trailing Labour by an average of 21 per cent in the polls, will see the light and reward him.
The gap between his self-image and the dank and dismal reality was there for all to see when he announced the election. The rain poured down on Downing Street. Sunak didn’t have an umbrella or coat - presumably his PR people told him that umbrellas were for wimps, and coats for losers.
A small, sodden figure exhorting a nation he never understood.
Protesters on the other side of the security barrier blasted out D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better, the theme song to Tony Blair’s landslide victory of 1997.
Sunak gave no reason for going early. He exhibited no understanding that the public punishes parties that drag them to the polls early without good cause.
In these circumstances, I don’t hold out much hope for Sunak’s chances of getting through the campaign without becoming more of an embarrassment to himself and all who are relying on him than he already is. Nor do most Labour politicians.
In the 2017 general election campaign, Theresa May went in with an enormous poll lead and lost pretty much all of it. Sunak looks as if he can top that performance.
I will hold myself to account here if I am wrong but I believe the Tories are heading for an epic defeat to match 1906,1945 and 1997.
Boris Johnson’s contempt for the suffering of ordinary people, Liz Truss’s economic madness, and the decline and debilitation of the UK over the last 14 years, have doomed the party. It’s not that millions of British people have suddenly become left-wing. The decay of the nation is just too visible
If you want to look for rational reasons for his decision to cut and run, look at Sunak’s weaknesses.
Now is about as good as it gets for the Tories in 2024, which is a pretty horrific thought for those of us who must live in the UK. Inflation is almost down to its 2 percent target, so the Conservatives can belatedly reclaim the economic competence mantle.
Yet core inflation remains high and the promised interest rate cuts look far away.
Better to go now than face the music in the autumn. The arguments for a July election, in other words, are based on pessimism not optimism: the well-merited fear that things can only get worse.
As one minister anonymously told Times radio "Things have started to go wrong... that's going to keep happening. You don't want to be sat there in Downing Street all summer while they do"
No part of the public sector seems secure. The prisons are falling apart and the Conservatives, once the party of law and order, are begging judges to delay court cases rather than send convicts to jail. The NHS waiting list stands at 7.6 million. The rivers are full of sewage. After loading the public with debt so it could reward its managers and shareholders, there is a chance that Thames Water could go bust. Sue Gray, the civil servant turned Labour adviser, added to the list of potential disasters a new government will face, the real prospect of local authorities and universities collapsing.
And all this before we get to war in Europe and Trump returning to power.
Nothing Sunak now says can hide the echoing vacuum where a Conservatives programme should be. One way to look at the UK is to see it as a guinea pig for right-wing experiments. We had fiscal conservatism with Cameron, Brexit nationalism with Johnson and Farage, and Reaganite economics with Truss.
All have failed. What is now left for them – or for us?
What on earth will Sunak say to the public to justify another five years of Conservative rule?
Not much. All he and the Tory press can do is launch scare stories about Labour and hope they cut through.
Astonishingly, or perhaps not so astonishingly, there are still rich men willing to give the Tories money. In the year to April, they raised £35 million compared to Labour’s reported donations of £24 million.
You can buy an awful lot of dirt with that kind of money. And I have no doubt
they will.
We ought to have a rigorous national debate about how we can afford to fund the NHS, the universities, local government, and the armed forces. What taxes should rise? How can we improve our competitiveness? We desperately need to talk about repairing our relationship with Europe.
I am not sure we will. Serious debate is beyond much of our media. Until we have leaders willing to face hard truths, the real problems of the country will stay hidden.
But I refuse to sign off as a pessimist.
We will be in a new world in a few weeks. We will have a Parliament where the majority, perhaps the overwhelming majority, of MPs will support action to tackle climate change, poverty, home building and a new and better relationship with our European neighbours.
That can’t be all bad, can it?
I enjoy writing this newslestter. But it is a lot of work! Please consider taking out a paying subscription if you can afford to. You will have access to all articles, archives and podcasts, and you will allow me to carry on writing!
I think Sunak is hoping there will be a bounce of patriotic fervour from an England performance in the Euros. Imagine putting your political hopes on England doing well at football. July 4th will be just before they get knocked out in the semi finals.
"Sunak gave no reason for going early. He exhibited no understanding that the public punishes parties that drag them to the polls early without good cause."
I agree with the rest of the piece but am not sure I do with this: for all the references yesterday to a 'snap election', we're well over four years into this term and I don't see how dragging things out to Oct/Nov/Jan(!) would have got a warmer response from the public.