The election is on, but why now?

Why has Sunak chosen a snap summer election, and what can we expect in the next six weeks?

Yesterday Rishi Sunak stood in the pouring rain to call a general election for July 4th which took pretty much everyone by surprise, including his own MPs. So why has he chosen a snap summer election rather than clinging onto power for as long as possible, and what can we expect from the election campaign?

Inexplicable optics

How did Sunak’s advisers decide that he should stand in the pouring rain to make this announcement?

It’s utterly absurd to make a major announcement standing in the rain after the Tories blasted £1.8 million on a new Downing Street Press Briefing Room in 2021, so the decision had to be deliberate.

They obviously chose not to equip Sunak with an umbrella to avoid comparisons with Steve McClaren’s 2007 "wally with a brolly" moment, but he ended up looking just as ridiculous getting needlessly soaked.

Sunak was obviously trying to avoid a “wally with a brolly” moment

Perhaps his advisors thought he’d look like a hard-working statesman who is prepared to get soaked to get the job done, but he ended up looking like the incompetent fool he is.

Odd timing

A snap summer election is an extremely odd choice for an unpopular party that’s clinging onto power and just got thumped in local elections a few weeks ago, especially given that they’re still short of candidates in a reported 150 constituencies.

The Tories could have clung onto power for at least another six months and hoped their diabolical polling was going to turn around, but Sunak’s decided to go now, presumably because he wants to get the pain over with as soon as possible.

Independence Day

It still seems incredible that Sunak was ever promoted to Prime Minister after secretly pretending to be a full-time citizen of the United States while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer (while his wife simultaneously pretended to be resident in India).

In light of this entirely unpunished scandal, calling the general election so he loses his job on US Independence Day is somehow fitting.

Unpreparedness

The Tories aren’t the only party that hasn’t got their candidates sorted out for a general election that’s only six weeks away. Labour look set to undemocratically impose Starmer acolytes in constituencies across the country, and Reform’s selection process has been an absolute shambles so far, with multiple candidates given the boot for bigotry and extreme-right fanaticism already.

It’s a sad situation for the country that we’re likely to end up with a load of virtually unvetted politicians in parliament who were parachuted into constituencies at the last minute.

The Tory slush-fund

We know that the Tories are sitting on a vast election slush fund, much of which has been donated by the vile racist who called for Diane Abbott to be killed, and we also know how they’re likely to spend it.

In 2019 the Tories blasted £millions on social media dark ads, scammy Google ads designed to hack searches like "Labour Manifesto" with Tory propaganda, and unlawful smear campaigns in scores of marginal constituencies operated through dodgy Tory shell companies.

Everyone should be prepared for another sickening barrage of Tory propaganda after all of their 2019 misconduct went entirely unpunished, and after the diabolical Tory propaganda campaign in the London mayoral election earlier this month.

Lack of ground game

Given their unpopularity, and having lost another 500 councillors just weeks ago, the Tory ground game looks likely to be weaker than ever.

However Labour are also likely to be short of activists too given the 200,000 odd collapse in membership under Starmer’s leadership; their tactic of ousting popular local candidates to shoehorn Starmer cronies into position; and their unappealing prescription of more austerity, more under-investment, and more privatisation, with a sickening dollop of genocide complicity on top.

14 Years of misery

One of the Tories’ biggest problems is that there’s virtually nothing they can point to that’s actually got better since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010.

Real-terms wages stagnant for a decade and a half; national debt tripled; all-time high NHS waiting lists; overcrowded prisons and vast court backlogs; obscene energy bills; rivers full of sewage and private water profiteers on the verge of bankruptcy; local government finances in ruins; embarrassingly outdated transport infrastructure and roads full of potholes; thousands of schools now operated by greedy academy profiteers; self-imposed Brexit sanctions really beginning to bite; worst pensions in Europe; wildly unaffordable housing …

Wherever we look the country seems like it’s locked into terminal economic decline, and the main culprits are obviously the party that’s had 14 unbroken years in power.

Unpopularity

The Tory polling situation is absolutely dire. No government has ever called a General Election at such a state of unpopularity.

The Tories have been stuck at below 25% for well over a year. To put this into context John Major’s Tory government was at 30% before Blair’s landslide in 1997, and Callaghan’s Labour were at almost 40% before they lost power to Thatcher in 1979.

Even if Reform UK predictably stand down their candidates in Tory held constituencies, transferring most of their vote to Sunak’s party, it seems inconceivable that the Tories could recover enough to avoid a historic electoral thrashing.

No real opposition

Perhaps one of the reasons Sunak seems content to walk into almost inevitable defeat like this is that he knows that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are intent on continuing the Tory economic agenda of austerity ruination, under-investment, and running the country for the benefit of private profiteers, rather than the people who actually live in it?

As one of the richest people in the world Sunak can retire to a life of luxury (in California?), comfortable in the knowledge that Keir Starmer won’t do anything to reverse the Tory agenda of serving the interests of the rich at the expense of everyone else.

Widespread apathy

Plenty of people will be happy to see the backs of the Tory party, but Keir Starmer has made it absolutely clear that he’s got nothing to offer but "more of the same", meaning many millions will be left with the dispiriting non-choice between voting for "the lesser of two evils", protest voting for minor parties with no chance of winning, or abstaining altogether.

It wouldn’t be surprising if July 2024 delivers one of the lowest turnout general elections of all time.