Three weeks in and the British election campaign is playing out as an epic blunder for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that threatens to redraw the UK political map for a generation.
Sunak believed his surprise decision last month to call an election on July 4, months before it needed to take place, would catch his political opponents off guard and give him and his ruling Conservative Party the chance to reverse months of poor poll ratings.
Those hopes were washed away within hours when, bizarrely, he chose to announce the forthcoming poll to the waiting media in the pouring rain standing alone outside his official residence in Downing Street in London.
The image of a sodden and hapless Sunak splashed across every news bulletin and front page served only to reinforce the public’s view of the 44-year-old former hedge-funder and Stanford alum as a prime minister out of his depth and heading out of power.
Yet worse was to come for a man who took over as Conservative leader less than two years ago promising to be a safe pair of hands after 49 days of chaos under Liz Truss and three years of circus under Boris Johnson.
Few things touch the British sense of itself as its wartime past. So, his decision to skip part of the 80th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings in France June 6 was as inexplicable as it was calamitous.
“I hope that veterans and others can find it in their hearts to forgive me,” was the cringing apology from Sunak on Monday.
Such a crass mistake would be a disaster for any party but is now a mortal threat to one that won a landslide victory under Johnson less than five years ago but now faces a pincer attack from both right and left.
Tapping into concerns among some voters about immigration and national identity, the right-wing populist party, Reform, now led by Donald Trump confidante Nigel Farage, is unlikely itself to win many, if any, seats in Parliament in July. But it will take a chunk of votes away from Sunak’s Conservatives, robbing them of dozens of MPs.
The main beneficiary will be the UK’s main opposition party, Labour. Led by Keir Starmer, a former lawyer who led the country’s national prosecuting authority for five years until 2013, it looks set to win a commanding majority with its first general election win since Tony Blair won a record third term almost 20 years ago.
Starmer will inherit a dreadful set of circumstances when he enters No. 10 on July 5. The UK economy is barely out of a recession and growth has been sclerotic for 15 years, made worse by the UK’s exit from the European Union following the Brexit referendum. Public services like schools, hospitals and courts are crumbling, and the war in Ukraine will demand that a new government rapidly increases spending on defense even though the tax burden is at its highest since World War II.
Unlike in 1997, when Tony Blair was first elected prime minister, Labour will have few levers to pull to turn things around quickly, and Starmer has sensibly cautioned against making too many ambitious promises.
Some say he has been too cautious. But “better to underpromise and overdeliver than to overpromise and underdeliver” is a refrain he uses often, and he will approach issues with a studious pragmatism, including relations with the U.S.
With Trump in the White House, expect Sir Keir to work hard to avoid the likely theater and drama that so often accompanies the former president, and quietly to build relationships that maximize British influence in key areas like defense and trade.
A second term for President Biden would provide more opportunities for greater collaboration on wider issues, including the transition to clean energy supply, where Labor has looked admiringly at the U.S. experience over the period of the current administration.
As for the Conservatives, they face a possible electoral meltdown at the coming election. Some believe it may merge with Farage’s Reform party as part of a lurch to the populist right. Whatever its form, the party risks being out of power for a decade or more.
For Sunak, who is Britain’s first prime minister of Indian heritage, his political career at the top will be over, and there has even been speculation in the UK that he and his family may move to California, where they own a desirable Pacific-facing penthouse in Santa Monica.
However terrible his political legacy will be, he certainly will not be short of money. The annual Sunday Times Rich List in the UK estimates that the personal wealth of Sunak and his wife, Aksharta Murty, rose last year to about $830 million — more than that of King Charles III.
Ed Owen is a UK communications and political adviser based in Washington, D.C. and former special adviser to Tony Blair’s Labor government between 1997 and 2005.