Rishi Sunak surprised everyone this week with a 4 July election. This will be the first July election, in fact, in 79 years which might not be a good omen for the prime minister as 1945 saw his party defeated in a landslide. And while then the popular slogan was ‘Cheer Churchill, Vote Labour’, it is difficult to imagine Sunak will enjoy the same levels of gratitude as he helicopters up and down the country.
The timing of the election has bewildered most observers and positively angered many Tory MPs who expected the PM to cling on a little longer to October or November. Could it be that the flicker of good economic news in the inflation and growth numbers are as good as it will get any time soon? That there is no prospect of headroom for a final pre-election National Insurance cut? That Sunak feared further humiliation around his small boats crusade and the state of the NHS? Or was it that the letters of no confidence were already going in to the 1922 Committee and Sunak used the prerogative power at his disposal, to seek a dissolution, before his enemies could oust him? We might have to wait until the memoirs to be sure (though that won’t be long).
You have to go back to February 1974 to find a party coming from behind in the polls to win an election. And even here it was Harold Wilson’s Opposition Labour party that secured a minority government with more seats than the outgoing Conservatives but actually a lower share of the vote. And sure, governing parties lagging the opposition can often expect to make up some ground during the campaign. But as Sunak went to the Palace on Tuesday, the election campaign kicked off with the Conservatives not so much behind Labour as trailing distantly by a solid 20 points — something which has been pretty consistent since Sunak became PM in October of 2022. If the polls do not shift, this will represent an incredible swing from Conservative to Labour as compared with the 2019 election, bigger than 1997 and which would be enough to see a Blair style landslide for Keir Starmer. Only the evidence from the recent local elections is that the swing is not uniform, it’s much more effective at ousting Conservatives.
Sunak drew comfort from those results in that his party won 26% of the vote, higher than opinion polling suggests and a smaller margin to Labour (let’s leave aside the fact it wasn’t a nationally representative vote). But the real story was that a party polling 16%, the Lib Dems, managed to win more council seats than the governing Conservatives. That is the Labour/Lib Dem vote has become much more efficient than the Conservatives who also must contend with Reform snapping at their heels, determined to damage or even destroy them. And so while there are numerous scenarios about what will happen, ranging from a hung parliament to outright ‘Canada style’ Tory obliteration, no serious analyst thinks Sunak will be Prime Minister by the lunchtime of 5 July.
But enough about guessing the result, we will know that soon enough. What difference will it all make? To say that Keir Starmer and his party have been cautious in setting out their stall would be an understatement. And strategically it’s easy to see why. Will such a commanding Labour poll lead, there have been virtually no routes back for the Conservatives of their own making. But there were scenarios where Labour missteps, miscalculates, or even implodes. Starmer’s caution has avoided that, holding steady and waiting for the inevitable day which has finally come.
Unfortunately, that means that there is still some mystery about what a Starmer government will really be like. We know it promises stability and competence; a safe pair of hands and an end to a lot of culture war nonsense. And we have some pledges and a handful of key policies. But real substance? What will be interesting about this campaign is how bold Starmer is prepared to be — how far he is prepared to drift from his inherent managerialism to setting out a (radical) programme for government. For he surely knows that if he really wants to be transformative, those ambitions need to be set out before polling day.