There's only one reason Rishi Sunak has called a General Election now (2024)

The ‘pathetic fallacy’, a literary device in which weather mirrors mood, has long haunted British politics.

The day of the 1997 election, which marked the end of 18 long years of Tory rule, was gloriously sunny. Thirteen years later, as Gordon Brown left Downing Street, it was overcast.

Neither, though, felt quite as on the nose as yesterday.

Why anybody in Rishi Sunak’s team had believed it was sensible to give a statement outside, in England, on the second wet day in a row is not clear.

Did they fear that, without the famous black door of Number 10 behind him, we’d all somehow forget he was Prime Minister?

Whatever the reason, though, the heavens opened just in time to ruin Sunak’s day.

‘Historically,’ the menswear writer Derek Guy tweeted alongside a picture of the Prime Minister looking like he’d just stopped crying, ‘men in this situation used a folding canopy called an umbrella.’

The weather was not the only problem. Seemingly understanding he’d have few more opportunities to lecture us, Sunak began reeling off an interminable list of ways in which he’d made things only slightly worse.

Halfway through, though – long before he’d got as far as actually naming the General Election date, which we’d all tuned in to hear – his words were drowned out by a familiar tune.

Somewhere nearby, someone was playing the D:Ream song forever associated with Labour’s 1997 landslide.

The fact nobody had foreseen any of this felt like a fitting end to a government that had spent 17 months in office failing to foresee rather a lot of things.

It seems unlikely this was the plan. For months, rumours had circulated of divisions at the top of the Tory party over the best date to go to the country.

One faction, believing there’s a narrow path to victory, or possibly because they simply weren’t ready to give up power, was said to favour holding off and the hope that something would turn up.

The other, fearing that whatever did turn up was likely to be bad, and that making us wait was only going to boost Labour’s poll ratings further, were said to want to get things over with rather sooner.

Rishi Sunak, whose short tenure as Prime Minister has not quite matched that of Anthony Eden’s, was assumed to belong to the former group.

So the received wisdom was that we had long months stretching out ahead of us before anything might happen. The inhabitants of the Westminster bubble had begun booking their summer holidays.

That logic seemed solid as recently as yesterday morning, and what changed things is not exactly clear.

One theory is that the Prime Minister believed that the reduction in inflation, not as far as hoped but a good news story nonetheless, was the closest he was getting to a decent hook on which to hang a campaign.

(This is funny because, by immediately calling an election, he’s ensured much of the public will never hear about it.)

Another theory is that going now gives Sunak and his team more influence over the candidate list, and thus whatever party eventually emerges from the wreckage of a landslide defeat.

A third is that Rishi Sunak has simply had enough – and the new school term in his second home of California begins in August.

Whatever, the truth, though, this was clearly a last minute decision.

Witness the fact that more than one senior minister was originally scheduled to spend the day abroad, with the streets of the Albanian capital Tirana plastered with union flags, as a special treat for Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

Or consider the fact that, both before and after the announcement, furious Tory rebels were briefing that a leadership challenge could still be on the cards.

That seems unlikely to actually happen – even this Tory party is surely not mad enough to change leader in the middle of a campaign, or to cancel an election altogether on the grounds that they’re likely to lose.

But the very fact it was briefed tells us two things. One is that the party is unlikely to be able to present a unified face to the electorate. The other is that many of its members have yet to come to terms with a future in which their views will simply cease to matter.

There is another possible explanation for why we weren’t having an election on Wednesday morning, but were by Wednesday night.

The two key characteristics of Rishi Sunak’s approach to leadership have been an inability to stick to a plan, even as he accuses Labour of not having one; and a patronising, irritable tone suggesting he thinks everybody else is stupid.

The result of that has been a grab bag of policies – more maths, more chess, fewer cigarettes, fewer trains, and an obsession with sending migrants to Rwanda – with no ideological or strategic coherence behind them.

The obvious reason we’re now having an election which even senior ministers were not expecting is that Rishi Sunak has decided he wants one – and Rishi Sunak reckons he knows best.

Perhaps the moment he found himself inaudible, soaked to the skin and drowned out by a Labour anthem may have momentarily shaken that confidence.

Never mind.

It’ll be sunny in California.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk.

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