Britain awaits elections without elimination

The British general election, which will be held on July 4, was over before it began. Five and a half weeks ago, in a relentless downpour of cold spring rain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, doomed to defeat, stood outside 10 Downing Street and declared that he had asked the king to dissolve Parliament. Now is the time for Britain to choose its future, Sunak declared, as brilliantly as he could.

The British political system gives sitting governments a distinct advantage, allowing them to choose when to call elections, as long as they are held at least every five years. Sunak, who leads the Conservative Party, was toying with a January 2025 deadline, and most people, including most in his party, thought he would wait until October or November, hoping that the economy would improve a bit, or that one of his flagship policies (say, deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda) would take effect. But instead, with his party some twenty-two points behind Labour in the polls, Sunak ran early. The Shakespeare quote “In delay, there is not much, I think,” was on his mind, a senior Cabinet minister told me. It was an example of what Sunak likes to call bold action. Now, I cannot and will not pretend that we have done everything right. No government should, Sunak said, as the rain fell and the end of fourteen years of dispiriting Tory rule finally drew near. But I am proud of what we have achieved together. The bold steps we have taken.

The Conservative campaign was, from the start, an exercise in damage control. It was about not wanting to give the impression of hanging on until the end, the Cabinet minister told me. The party's grip on power and credibility in the public imagination has disintegrated since Boris Johnson won a landslide victory, thanks to Brexit, over Jeremy Corbyn's Labor Party in 2019. Before that election, the Conservatives held three hundred and forty-five seats out of six hundred and fifty. seats in the House of Commons. Retaining even half that figure, which would condemn the party to its worst defeat since Tony Blair and New Labor's landslide victory in 1997, would be considered a form of success. Polls showed the Conservatives winning just over a hundred seats, which would be their worst result in two centuries. Once the campaign began, the Party alternated between warning about tax increases under Labor and the risk of a possible supermajority, the idea that Labor could win the election so convincingly that this would be bad for democracy itself. “I think it's absolutely legitimate to say that the country is not functioning well when you get majorities the size of Blairs or larger,” Grant Shapps, the defense secretary, told Times Radio.

In theory, Sunak should have been adept at running a defensive campaign. Since taking over as prime minister, after Liz Truss’s 49 days of shock therapy in the autumn of 2022, his trademark has been competence and control. As he moved from constituency visits to televised debates, Sunak, who has a net worth of around £650m, looked like an expensive accountant overseeing a complicated bankruptcy procedure. He had every figure at his fingertips, every policy mastered, every rebuttal refuted beforehand. Sunak’s mood as a politician is one of polite exasperation. He has read the briefing. He knows how it all plays out. supposed We don't have to work. It's not his fault that we're all too stupid to realise it. Or that poverty levels have doubled. Or that there aren't enough teachers. Or that the National Health Service is on its knees. Rishi is a very, very clever guy. He's got a keen eye for detail. He likes political debate. He likes the battle of ideas, a former Conservative Party strategist told me. But it's not ultimately about trying to build connections, or trying to stir emotions, or anything like that.

Because British policy cannot function without invoking the Second World War, Sunak has been accused of implementing a Dunkirk strategy – a reference to the heroic evacuation of Allied forces from the beaches of northern France at the end of the spring of 1940. It was unfortunate, because on June 6, the eightieth anniversary of the landing, Sunak chose to leave the commemorations on the beaches of northern France a few hours early, in order to return in time for a interview on ITV News. Oh, my God, hello!… Sorry to have kept you, Sunak apologized, greeting Paul Brand, the presenter. Everything overflowed. It was amazing, but it just went over the top.

Sunak's decision to skip even part of the D-Day ceremonies was a simple punchline. (Presidents Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, each with, it is fair to say, much to fear, managed to get away with it.) Nigel Farage, who had stood in the election three days earlier as as leader of Reform UK, the latest vehicle to date. for his far-right anti-immigrant political movement, said the Prime Minister, who is British Indian, does not understand our history and culture. (Farage has been accused of being racist and has gobbled up media coverage.) Penny Mordaunt, a former rival for the Conservative Party leadership, who represented the Tories in an election debate, said Sunak's behavior was completely wrong.

But Sunak is richer than the king. He is disconnected from reality. During the interview he was so keen to return for, Sunak, whose father worked as a family doctor for the NHS and whose mother was a pharmacist, was asked about the sacrifices he had to make as a child. All sorts of things, he said, several times, before deciding on Sky TV, a satellite entertainment package. When Sunak finally apologized for leaving Normandy early, he asked voters to find it in their hearts to forgive me – a phrase he repeated so often, and with such unfailingly similar intonation, that it was like listening to an AI model going through a breakup.

After D-Day, the Conservatives' strategy in Dunkirk began to look more like a retreat from Moscow. Two candidates, including the wife of the party's campaign manager, were among the many people who investigation Authorities have accused Sunak of placing illicit bets on the election date, before it was publicly announced. James Cracknell, a former Olympic rower who is standing for the Conservatives in Colchester, has described his own party as a shower of shit. Sunak has abandoned his attempts at contrition and has become irritable and confrontational instead. He has dared voters to disagree with him. Facing a sceptical audience at a BBC town hall meeting in York last week, Sunak insisted he would withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights – a treaty championed by Winston Churchill, among others, in 1948 – if it stood in the way of his plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. When a man in the crowd pointed out that this would put the UK in the same international category as Russia and Belarus, Sunak said he would do it anyway. People nodded and shook their heads. There were cries of shame. Sunak, thin and tense, pretended not to hear. His trademark of the moment, the former strategist said, half-jokingly, was: “Why don’t you understand how brilliant I am?”

The beneficiary of all this, and the heir to an almighty mess, is Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party. Starmer, aged sixty-one, was elected to succeed Corbyn in the spring of 2020. His transformation of Labour into a centrist party has once again been steady and predictable in the extreme. He is calm and serious. He likes to appear in white shirt sleeves, with the cuffs rolled up, or in dad-worthy leisurewear, with lots of zips. In 1996, Roy Jenkins, a former Labour minister and historian, described Blair, as he approached Downing Street, as a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor. Starmer has been in vase mode for about four years now. The slogan of Labour’s election campaign, which may turn out to be the most successful in the party’s history, is not even a slogan. Change. That’s it.

On 13 June I went to Manchester to see Starmer launch the party manifesto. The staging was socialist in spirit. The party officials gathered in the atrium of the headquarters of the Co-op Group, a descendant of the 19th-century co-operative movement. The office block is on the former site of the Old Town, Manchester’s most appalling and politically significant Victorian slum. If anyone wants to see how much space a human being can move through, how little air and such No matter how much air he can breathe, no matter how little civilization he can share and yet live, he only has to travel here, wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in Englandin 1845.

But Starmer managed to reverse the party's leftward shift under Corbyn. When you lose that badly, you don't turn to the voters and say, “What were you thinking you were doing?” » he had told an audience the previous night in Grimsby. You look at your party and you say, “We have to change. » In this election, Starmer has elevated political opportunism to the level of principle. He uses the phrase “Country first, party second” to describe his thinking on a given issue, including his decision to abandon most left-wing promises (such as nationalization of the energy, rail and transportation systems). water of the country) which allowed him to become leader of the Labor Party in the first place. “Have I changed my mind about these promises? » he told Grimsby. Yes, I have changed.