Things Can Only Get Worse for Rishi Sunak
7 min read
Please read this as classic British understatement: Today was not, on the face of it, an ideal time for Rishi Sunak to call an election.
One of the perks of being Britain’s prime minister is getting to choose the date when voters deliver their verdict on your government. Most push their advantage by selecting a time when their party is ahead in the polls, the economic mood is buoyant, and their supporters are optimistic about success.
None of those things is true now for Sunak and his Conservative Party, who will face voters on July 4. Since the last election, in December 2019, the Tories have dispensed with Boris Johnson for partying through COVID and Liz Truss for somehow tanking the economy in a mere 49 days in office. Sunak, who has been prime minister only since October 2022, was required to call an election by December, but no one quite understands why he has done it now.
Like many other commentators, I had been assuming that Sunak would wait as long as he could—into the fall or winter—on the principle that, as Charles Dickens’s Mr. Micawber put it, “something will turn up.” What that might have been, I couldn’t imagine, but calling an election when you are 20 points behind in the polls is the act of a gambler putting it all on a horse with three legs—or of a kamikaze pilot determined to get the pain over with. If he wins, or even manages to deliver a respectable enough performance to return a hung Parliament, everyone in British politics will be surprised. Probably including Sunak.
The recent local and mayoral elections were bloody for the Tories. They lost nearly 500 local councilors, the mayoral elections in London and Birmingham, and a special election in the northern-English constituency of Blackpool South. “For the Conservative government the message is crystal clear,” Rob Ford, a political-science professor at Manchester University, wrote on Substack after the results came out. “Voters want them out, everywhere, by any means necessary. That mood is as strong as ever and time is running out to change it.” Added to this, Sunak’s personal ratings are woeful: Polls show that a majority of Britons find him incompetent, unlikable, or indecisive.
As for the economy, Sunak can now boast—and did, several times, at Prime Minister’s Questions today—that inflation has returned to “normal.” The latest figures are 2.3 percent, down from more than 10 percent in the last three months of 2022, when Sunak took over from Truss. (She’s the one who was outlasted by a head of lettuce.) Apart from that, though, the figures are gloomy. The British economy grew only 0.1 percent last year and went into recession in the last quarter of 2023; in the first quarter of this year growth was an anemic 0.6 percent.
Sunak’s own foot soldiers have little confidence in his ability to pull off a surprise victory: More than 60 Conservative members of Parliament—nearly a fifth of the party—have already decided not to run in the next election, on the assumption that they will lose their seats or at best return to Westminster for years of boring grind in opposition. When rumors of an election announcement began to gather force earlier today, one Tory rebel responded by floating the possibility of a no-confidence vote. If you want a sense of how unexpected this announcement was, consider the fact that today was listed on the government’s schedule as the launch of a website telling Britons to stockpile canned goods in case of another pandemic or similar emergency. To use British understatement again, this is not an ideal message to push as you ask people to agree that they are safer with you in charge. Everything is going great! Make sure you have enough potable water to last three days!
So why call an election now? Presumably because Sunak thinks, in an inversion of the song that soundtracked Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997, things can only get worse. And sure enough, when Sunak made his announcement outside Downing Street, a protester outside the gates started to play “Things Can Only Get Better” at ear-splitting volume, drowning out the prime minister’s recitation of his record in office, and of the threats currently facing Britain. As it turned out, things could also only get wetter, as spring rain soaked the normally dapper Sunak. He was just a man, standing in front of an electorate, asking them not to humiliate him at the ballot box.
“I cannot and will not claim we have got everything right,” he said outside No. 10, with yet more understatement. Alongside cutting inflation, Sunak had pledged upon taking office to “stop the boats” carrying asylum seekers from France to England’s southern coast. This was always an impossible promise, and sure enough, he hasn’t kept it. Instead, the government has pivoted to talking up its success in clearing the backlog in the asylum system, and passing a divisive new law that allows asylum claimants to be sent to Rwanda. The party best placed to capitalize on a sense that Sunak has not delivered on immigration is Reform, the successor to the U.K. Independence Party. But the local elections showed that its ground organization is still patchy, and the energetic and well-known Nigel Farage, who co-founded the party, has so far resisted calls to serve as its leader. Holding an election now significantly diminishes the threat to the Tories from the radical right.
An imminent election also saves them the trouble of explaining how they plan to make the country’s budget add up next year. Conservatives usually win elections by presenting themselves as sober, tough guardians of the public finances. Instead, as the former Tory policy adviser Sam Freedman wrote in March, Sunak and his chancellor of the exchequer “set the loosest (and most absurd) fiscal rules on record and then only met them by setting fantasy spending numbers for after the election.” Then, Freedman added, rather than investing in public services, they used “this fiscal jiggery-pokery … to fund £35 billion of tax cuts. For which they have got precisely no credit from anyone.”
Britain has been governed by the Conservatives since 2010. A decade of austerity, followed by a COVID-era borrowing binge, has meant that the National Health Service, schools, the court system, and other public needs are crying out for money, even as the national debt stands at almost 100 percent of GDP. Another round of spending cuts is inconceivable. The only two other answers to this challenge—higher taxes and higher borrowing—are politically unpalatable. So the Tories (and, to be fair, Labour too) are pretending that the problem can be solved with economic growth. Yesterday, the government announced £10 billion in compensation for victims in the infected-blood scandal, wherein the health service, over several decades, gave new mothers and transplant patients plasma contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C. The payout was a just and overdue decision, but its sheer size made finding money for further preelection tax cuts basically impossible.
By calling the election early, Sunak will also hope to wrongfoot the opposition parties, who must scramble to find candidates in open seats and build up funds. Keir Starmer’s Labour starts the six-week campaign from way behind: In the December 2019 election, the party lost 59 seats, including Brexit-backing territories in northern England that had been reliably left-wing for decades. As a result, to achieve an overall majority, Labour requires a swing greater than the party saw in 1997—under the young, popular, charismatic Tony Blair. And Starmer is no Blair. He is a low-key, borderline bland 61-year-old who speaks in careful, lawyerish tones, and seems to get passionate only about his football team. But his ruthless party management has resulted in the purge of his hard-left predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn; the creation of a disciplined team of ministers-in-waiting; and a return to the political center. The Conservative attack lines that worked so well last time—Labour is blocking Brexit, Labour has an anti-Semitism problem, Labour is a group of spendthrift socialists—tend to bounce off Starmer, who whipped his party to vote for a hard Brexit and expelled his former boss for not taking anti-Semitism seriously, and whose shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, relishes her reputation for grim fiscal discipline.
For much of the British public, the prospect of an imminent election probably feels like a relief. Because of his dire poll ratings, Sunak had lost authority, without his party quite having the courage to replace him after less than 19 months in the job. The Conservatives had lost momentum. Some of their most effective ministers have stepped down, and the Tories’ quarrelsome right flank is already fighting for control of the party in opposition. Britain will go to the polls on July 4, the date that Americans celebrate cutting their old rulers loose. If the polls are right, a majority of Britons are about to do the same.
