After six months spent sealing his party’s fate, Rishi Sunak departed Downing Street on 5 July 2024 as the latest failed Conservative premier.
None of Sunak’s predecessors since 2010 checked out on their own terms. Each can cite at least one political crisis that rendered their continued premiership untenable.
This observation could be cause for celebration for Sunak. The former prime minister suffered no legacy-defining scandal or political crisis in his eighteen months in No 10. And yet his failure — and resultant defenestration — was no less conclusive. Marched towards the guns in July, 175 Conservative MPs lost their seats under Sunak’s leadership — including a record eleven cabinet ministers.
Rishi Sunak was a politician of paradoxes: his premiership was defined by paralysis and chaos. He was an uncomplicated tax-cutting Brexiteer viewed with instinctive suspicion by tax-cutting Brexiteers. And his political decline was simultaneously steady and spectacular — gradual then sudden.
From October 2022 to July 2024, the Conservative Party’s pursuit of its destiny would often intensify. But the party’s ultimate destination never definitively altered — nor did it show any sign of doing so. Sunak never urged his rebels to “put up or shut up” in a climactic confrontation. But every week ended with the PM’s authority to some degree diminished — at times slightly, often markedly. And after days spent in his infamously insular No 10 bunker, Sunak would emerge in crisis management mode — still days behind the story.
In the moments of stillness between his calamities, Sunak found little time for actual governing. That’s the essence of the tragedy of Rishi Sunak: the prime minister’s desperate search for historic “turning points” — in the form of his myriad strategies — only deepened the malaise. For all the talk of a “narrow, steep” path to victory, Sunak spent most of his premiership pursuing dead-end short-cuts and political cul de sacs.
The bottom line is brutal. In over a year and a half at the apex of politics, Sunak never stumbled across a political moment he couldn’t mismanage; a photo opportunity he couldn’t spoil with gaffes; or a “reset” effort he did not botch and quickly undo.
We begin with Sunak’s tone-setting New Year tumult.
Squatter Sunak
Rishi Sunak ended 2023 with a proclamation: the general election “will” be held next year, he informed lobby journalists at Downing Street’s annual Christmas drinks reception.
The statement was both newsworthy and not. Ostensibly, the prime minister was ruling out the possibility of an election in January 2025. Journalists in attendance were well aware that the prime minister, according to the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022, needed to call an election by 17 December 2024 to avoid parliament’s automatic dissolution and a Christmas campaign (can you imagine?).
But the otherwise empty declaration, (a January election would be politically farcical), began a doom spiral of speculation that would only culminate when he stepped soggily onto Downing Street in May. By December, Westminster had deduced that the timing of the spring budget — announced for the historically early date of 6 March — suggested the PM was keeping his election options open.
That was the backdrop to Sunak’s first public appearance of 2024. Placed in front of a pool camera on 4 January, the prime minister further clarified his position. “My working assumption is we’ll have a general election in the second half of this year”, he told broadcasters. The statement was so non-committal and slippery that its very utterance galvanised speculation; simultaneously, Labour leader Keir Starmer sneered that No 10 “squatter” Sunak had “bottled” an early election.
For months then, the prime minister embraced his prerogative right to keep Westminster in suspense. But the Labour-Tory call and response suggested Sunak was far from in control.
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The ‘green crap’ strikes back
The prime minister’s inability to seize the political agenda was the defining theme of the first six months of 2024. Case in points would arrive by the week — sometimes by the day.
On 5 January, Conservative MP Chris Skidmore announced his intention to resign from parliament in protest at Sunak’s net zero. In a calm but coruscating resignation missive, Skidmore castigated the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill — set for its commons second reading on 23 January — for “clearly promoting” the production of new oil and gas.
He went on to describe the relaxation of climate targets as “the greatest mistake of [Sunak’s] premiership”.
Skidmore’s decision to press the eject button left the prime minister facing another tricky by-election in Kingswood — one that looked even more winnable for Labour than its 2023 triumphs in Tamworth, Selby and Mid Bedfordshire. And so it proved.
Sunak’s determination to water down the government’s net zero commitments flowed from a by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. In July 2023, the Conservative Party bested Labour by 495 votes in Boris Johnson’s former constituency, following a campaign that capitalised on Sadiq Khan’s plan to extend the ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ). As such, there was some poetry in the fact that the political backlash to Sunak’s net zero “reset” culminated in Kingswood.
In February, with a majority of 2,501 votes, Labour sacked Skidmore’s former fiefdom. The episode underlines the primary pitfall of No 10’s politics by “dividing line” strategy: often the policy “wedge” was driven between Sunak and his own MPs.
‘Who would notice another madman around here?’
This was another recurring theme of Sunak’s premiership: and it never manifested more potently than in the Conservative debate on the Rwanda deportation scheme.
On Monday 14 January, a Daily Telegraph splash taunted Sunak with unfettered reality. “Tories facing 1997-style general election wipeout”, the headline read. The paper had been granted exclusive access to a new YouGov survey, commissioned by the clandestine Conservative Britain Alliance (CBA), that forecast a Labour majority of 135. Keir Starmer was expected to win 385 seats for his party, leaving the Conservatives on a mere 169.
Lord Frost, a former cabinet minister and incessant Sunak critic, penned an op-ed to coincide with the report. Frost claimed that the only way to avoid defeat was “to be as tough as it takes on immigration, reverse the debilitating increases in tax, end the renewables tax on energy costs — and much more”.
The poll struck Westminster on the week parliament was due to consider amendments to the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill — the government’s latest attempt to enable the wider scheme, after the Supreme Court’s ruling in November 2023.
In the debate that followed, Tory right critics of the PM — led by former home secretary Suella Braverman and ex-immigration minister Robert Jenrick — spearheaded plans to strengthen the legislation. In total, around 60 Conservative MPs backed the relevant amendments, with Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith resigning as party deputy chairs to offer their support.
But every amendment (with the help of opposition MPs) was defeated at committee stage. Moreover, in spite of all the noise from the now-infamous “five families”, only eleven Conservative MPs voted against the Rwanda bill at third reading. (It would have been twelve had Labour MP “giggling” not so riled Anderson, the Red Wall Rottweiler).
The rebellion’s eventual recession suggested Conservative MPs were, for the most part, not willing to countenance the collapse of Sunak’s government. But significantly, a small subsection was. And the “New Spartan” message was clear: Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill will not work, cannot work and the government is risking electoral armageddon in insisting it might.
In this regard, the failed Rwanda rebellion set the scene for Simon Clarke’s failed, one-man plot to oust Sunak in late January. Heading over the top in another Telegraph op-ed (the chosen forum for Sunak’s feral sceptics), Clarke declared that the PM is “leading the Conservatives into an election where we will be massacred”.
The former cabinet minister argued that Sunak, holed up in Downing Street, “does not get what Britain needs” and “is not listening to what the British people want”. The contribution came alongside another mysterious poll, commissioned by the CBA, that purported to show how a real conservative leader could quite easily best Starmer.
To counter Clarke, an array of Tory big beasts rushed to Sunak’s defence; the following prime minister’s questions came and went without an “in the name of God, go” moment. Sunak survived.
But by the end of January, it was obvious to outside observers that the Conservative Party was deeply, even terminally sick. With an election approaching, MPs were not falling behind their prime minister en masse; the conservative press’ antagonism was escalating, not diminishing; and privately — and at times very publicly — ambitious MPs postured for a future leadership contest that was now viewed as inevitable. (Kemi Badenoch was reported to have expressed “private” reservations about Sunak’s Rwanda approach, for example).
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Bye-bye-elections
In February, Keir Starmer stumbled into his own difficulties in the form of the tortured £28 billion climate climbdown and a candidate selection debacle-turned-antisemitism scandal. But it did not take long for the prevailing political narrative to shift against Rishi Sunak once more.
Recession news and a brace of by-election routings will do that.
On 15 February, Britain officially entered recession following two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Sunak, back in January 2023, had made growing the economy one of his five flagship “priorities” for government. The Rishession left that pledge “in tatters”, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves argued.
On that same day, voters in Kingswood and Wellingborough went to the polls — and their verdict was expectedly scathing. The result in Wellingborough blew expectations out of the water, as Labour’s candidate Gen Kitchen overturned a Conservative majority of more than 18,000 to seize Peter Bone’s former seat. The fall in the Conservative share of the vote — by an enormous 37.6 percentage points — was the worst the party had ever suffered in a by-election.
Undoubtedly, the circumstances of Bone’s ouster and the selection of his partner, Helen Harrison, to stand in his stead exacerbated Sunak’s woes. But if the swing in Wellingborough had been replicated nationally, contemporary analysts noted, Labour would gain 361 seats from the Conservatives. The governing party would be left with just four.
Sunak always sheltered behind the caveats — of which, in fairness, there are many in such contests. But the prime minister’s banal spin, that “mid-term by-elections are always difficult for incumbent governments”, rang utterly hollow.
Will the last Tory MP to leave parliament please turn out the lights?
All the while, drip by drip, statement by statement, the rolling revelations that a series of senior Conservative MPs would not be standing for re-election effectively confirmed the party had lost its fighting edge. Not every standing down statement (and there were many) was subjected to detailed textual analysis — but Paul Scully’s proved the exception.
In March 2024, former minister Scully declared his intention to stand down at the forthcoming election with a seething broadside directed at his party and its leadership. “Fuelled by division, the [Conservatives have] lost its way and needs to get a clear focus which I hope the budget can start to provide”, he asserted. “It needs a vision beyond crisis management which can appeal to a wider section of the electorate including younger people.”
Scully’s rant epitomised the ill-discipline that beset Conservative politics in 2024. But more significantly, the fatigued vibes of the MP exodus strengthened the sense of fin de régime enveloping Sunak’s party.
In time, sitting cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Chris Heaton-Harris would announce their intention to stand down from parliament. And by May, the scale of Sunak’s exodus broke the record set by the 1997 Tory out-take of 75 MPs.
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Jeremy Hunt’s last stand
“Great budgets change history”, Jeremy Hunt declared in a social media clip ahead of the spring budget on 6 March. The chancellor’s appeal to posterity marked a grand statement of intent: he planned to deliver a budget of genuine, historic consequence.
But when the annals of this latest phase of Conservative governance are written, Hunt’s fiscal measures will only feature above the footnotes to assess their insignificance. Hours before the chancellor arrived at the commons despatch box on budget day, The Times’ Steven Swinford lumbered Hunt’s headline proposals onto X (formerly Twitter). They included: another 2p cut in national insurance, an extension to the fuel duty freeze, a new tax on vapes, an increase in tobacco duty and the scaling back of the non-dom tax regime.
There was a time when Rishi Sunak looked ahead to a series of set-piece events on the near horizon — lauding each as a chrysalis chamber from which he would emerge energised and election-ready. And while few expected the spring budget to succeed where Conservative conference, the king’s speech, a cabinet reshuffle and the autumn statement failed, Hunt’s address was another chance to shift the stuck dial. But the legacy of Sunak’s reset era (c. September 2023 – March 2024) loomed large. Persistent strategic failure exacts a heavy toll.
Soon people just stop listening.
After the spring budget, the die was cast. The Conservative Party had essentially not fought the last three by-elections in Wellingborough, Kingswood or Rochdale. Meanwhile, every sepulchral set piece, electoral routing and distressing development further fanned the flames of MP cynicism. Both Sunak’s prescribed remedies and strategic retreats only served to make the situation worse.
The fear of impending electoral doom no longer impelled factional conquests. By March, Sunak acolyte and antagonist alike viewed the political scene with some shade of resigned fatalism.
Rishi Sunak was bad at politics
The defection of Lee Anderson to Reform UK was largely viewed in these terms.
“30p Lee [Anderson]” had been cast into the political wilderness in February after his comments criticising Sadiq Khan as in hoc to “Islamists” sparked widespread controversy. Remarking on the row at the time, Rishi Sunak described Anderson’s comments as “unacceptable” and “wrong”.
But Anderson’s defection was the culmination of a long arc of political miscalculation on the part of No 10. Sunak’s appointment of Anderson as deputy Conservative chair in February 2023 was a classic sop to his critics in a bid to scalp the Conservative Party’s “Bring Back Boris” clique. Over time, the move inflated Anderson’s political stock and ensured his interventions were treated with a degree of seriousness their substance could never justify per se.
Through a series of grave political blunders therefore, Sunak vastly increased the potential pain that Anderson, a natural critic, could cause him. And in whatever capacity the Reform MP served from 2022 to 2024, his actions impaired No 10’s ability to control the political narrative.
Across this period, Sunak suffered the political pain of appointing Anderson as deputy Conservative chair; the political pain of retaining Anderson as deputy Tory chair; the political pain of accepting his resignation; the political pain of suspending him; and the political pain that followed his defection to Reform.
Anderson was a living, breathing negation of Sunak’s authority. But more significantly, the full debacle — every strenuous episode — was profoundly illustrative of the PM’s political fallibility and inexperience.
Consider also the Frank Hester row, which unravelled days later and spoke to a level of political mismanagement on a tighter but somehow more maladroit scale.
In March, a Guardian scoop revealed that Hester — who gave the Conservatives £20 million this year — once remarked that Diane Abbott “should be shot”, and that the Labour MP made him “want to hate all black women”.
The official Conservative line accepted Hester’s version of events uncritically. “Mr Hester has made clear that while he was rude, his criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor the colour of her skin”, a Tory spokesperson told the Guardian following its initial story. Meanwhile, ministers sent on the broadcast round by No 10 condemned Hester’s comments as merely “wrong” and “inappropriate”.
But just 24 hours after the first dismissive statement, Downing Street issued a new missive conceding that the reported remarks were “racist and wrong”.
It was a Kemi Badenoch social media post that bounced Sunak into denouncing Hester’s comments as racist. “It’s never acceptable to conflate someone’s views with the colour of their skin”, the business and trade secretary intervened. The prime minister broke his silence via a spokesperson four hours later. Not even John Major, despite Tony Blair’s famous retort, was so clearly piloted between positions by his MPs.
The Hester episode, which saw a party line adopted by No 10, defended by ministers and subsequently abandoned — all in the space of a single news cycle — cast Conservative minds back to the ailing months of Boris Johnson’s administration. Awkward parallels were drawn with the former prime minister’s defence of Chris Pincher, the saga that prompted Rishi Sunak’s resignation as chancellor.
After the Anderson and Hester controversies, Westminster arrived collectively at the conclusion that Rishi Sunak was bad at politics. But the evidence had been there for months.
The prime minister’s penchant for off-kilter speeches about maths; his eyebrow-raising interview with Elon Musk; his deployment of a transgender jibe at PMQs while the mother of a murdered transgender teen toured the estate; his abrupt cancellation of the Greek prime minister over the Parthenon marbles; and his frequent strategic relaunches and de-launches were all cases in point. None of this was 4D chess — but rather misguided actions informed by a misreading of what the political moment demanded.
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Rishi Sunak was bad at elections
April arrived with two legislative successes for Rishi Sunak. His flagship phased smoking ban passed the House of Commons and provided the latest insight into the ideological splinters cracking Conservative politics. The vote saw a mass revolt from MPs hailing from the libertarian wing of the party, encompassing Badenoch and many of her inner circle.
Then the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act passed the Lords after an extended session of inter-House “ping-pong”. With the local elections fast approaching, Sunak told a press conference that the first deportation flights would now take place in “10 to 12 weeks”.
It wasn’t enough. On 2 May, the Conservative Party finished third and suffered their worst local elections defeat since 1996, losing over 500 council seats. Speaking to Sky News the following morning, local elections guru professor Michael Thrasher said the Conservative performance amounted to a “collapse”.
Sir John Curtice, an equally sober psephologist, proffered this grim proclamation: “We’re looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performance in local government elections for the last 40 years”.
Away from the council contests, the Conservatives lost the Blackpool South by-election with a 26.3 per cent swing — the party’s seventh by-election loss direct to Labour since 2021. Reform UK also recorded its highest-ever vote share of 16.9 per cent in Blackpool, surpassing the party’s previous high watermark of 13 per cent in Wellingborough.
Nonetheless, Rishi Sunak had avoided the confluence of factors needed to trigger another Conservative rebel move against him. The Tories were not pipped by Reform in Blackpool South (117 votes separated the parties); but more significantly, Ben Houchen won re-election in Tees Valley.
Throughout his campaign, Houchen (like Andy Street in Birmingham) had sought to distance himself from the Conservatives’ national brand. In fact, when it came time to deliver his victory address, Houchen did not even don a blue rosette — standard practice for any party politician. He later attributed his naked lapel to mere oversight, telling Sky News: “I didn’t have one and I forgot it.”
That it did not even cross the nominally Tory Tees Valley mayor’s mind to reach for a rosette was, naturally, highly revealing. Nor did Houchen’s much-discussed bid to distance himself from the national Conservative Party stop Sunak from visiting Teesside to bask in his mayoral glory.
The local elections should have been a reality check. But Sunak refused to recognise that a race that defies national trends definitionally cannot be treated as evidence of broader revivification. Health minister Andrea Leadsom’s claim that Houchen’s victory was an “absolute testament to the Conservative government” was so blind to political reality as to be insulting. Don’t for a second doubt it: Houchen won in spite of the Tory brand, not because of it.
And still, reports later suggested that Houchen’s victory hardened the prime minister’s resolve to hold a general election in the summer.
Time for one final reset
In the wake of the local elections, No 10 directed Westminster’s attention to Sunak’s latest “major” speech, this time on national security.
Addressing the Policy Exchange think tank on 13 May, Rishi Sunak warned that the world is “closer to a dangerous nuclear escalation than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis”.
The PM’s speech followed the announcement in April that a future Conservative government would spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030. Responding to the plan at the time, Labour adopted a less trenchant stance — arguing it would only do the same when the economic conditions allow.
Sunak’s security pitch suggested his strategists were now leaning heavily into damage limitation. A defence-oriented campaign was never going to generate a surprise groundswell of support for the Conservatives. And tellingly, days before Sunak’s Policy Exchange speech, the Guardian reported that CCHQ had updated their election strategy to focus on limiting MP losses, at the expense of making inroads into opposition territory. According to the paper, Sunak’s party would now plough extra resources into 200 seats deemed at risk at the next election.
The report signalled the end of the Conservative Party’s “80:20” election strategy, which saw CCHQ strategists focus on defending their eighty most marginal seats and winning twenty target seats.
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Conservative wet
On 22 May, after a day of feverish speculation in Westminster, Rishi Sunak confirmed that Britain would head to the polls on 4 July.
But the speech’s substance (Sunak stressed the importance of security) was not nearly as gripping as the surrounding context: Britons watched in collective awe as the prime minister powered through the rain, sans umbrella, and competed with anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray’s roaring loudspeakers. D:Ream’s classic tune, Things Can Only Get Better, memorably adopted by New Labour as its 1997 election anthem, reverberated around Downing Street. Even at this integral moment, Sunak struggled to own the political spotlight.
But there was method, we felt obliged to conclude, behind the madness.
An early election, called contrary to the settled consensus at Westminster, was designed to ambush Sunak’s opponents. Labour had reportedly loosened its limits on holidays for staffers — so sure was the party’s leadership that an election would be called in the autumn. Reform UK, meanwhile, was busy ridding its candidate ranks of cranks and conspiracists. Nigel Farage, then the party’s honorary president, was putting the infrastructure in place for a run of his own. But the ex-UKIP leader’s plans were far from fully formulated.
That was the central logic behind a summer poll. And around this core, a broader strategy began to form. In the opening days of the campaign, with Farage successfully wrong-footed, the Conservative Party dedicated its resources to neutralising the Reform threat. Press releases were duly pinged into journalists’ inboxes, outlining plans for a new national service scheme and a “pension triple lock plus”. The plan wasn’t especially subtle: but slowly, it was assumed, Sunak’s love-bombing would stabilise the Conservative core vote — or at least stem further leaking to the Faragist right.
In time, as the Conservatives’ ratings rallied at Reform’s expense, Sunak would pivot to Labour. A litany of attacks on tax would follow as the PM pried Keir Starmer’s Ming Vase from his clutches. Some Labour wobbles, if they were reflected in the polls, could lend credence to Tory warnings about a hung parliament and a ruling “coalition of chaos”. Successfully restyled as the race’s insurgent force, Sunak would use Starmer’s instinctive caution against him: voters might even accept his “bold plan”-“no plan” dichotomy.
But it didn’t take long for commentators to doubt Sunak’s vision. His sodden Downing Street speech set a seriously low bar for the following campaign — but one, as the gaffes piled up, he missed at every stage.
Guess who’s back?
So much of how the campaign unfolded was dictated not by Tory-Labour tussling, but by the dynamic between the Conservatives — one of the oldest political parties in the world seeking a fifth successive election victory — and Reform UK, the re-styled Brexit Party which only received official approval for its name change in January 2021.
Indeed, that was the battle Sunak picked when he decided, (1), to befuddle Farage with the election’s timing; and, (2), love-bomb his target voters with nationalistic policy. As I wrote in May, “It seems seriously unlikely that Sunak’s pitch to the UK right, based on national service (a non-priority, low salience policy) and pensions, will make up for his alleged ‘betrayal’ on migration”. I was right.
Sunak’s fate was sealed at a Reform UK press conference on Monday 3 July. Barely two weeks after informing the world he would not be standing as an MP in the upcoming election, Nigel Farage U-turned.
Farage’s statement addressed two issues: first, there was the lesser announcement that he would return as Reform leader for a five-year term, replacing incumbent Richard Tice. The more significant revelation — the culmination of the conference’s rhetorical crescendo — was that Farage would be standing for parliament in the constituency of Clacton.
Rishi Sunak was not even an MP when UKIP climbed to its electoral peak in 2014/2015. Now the prime minister — an inexperienced and frankly ineffective campaigner — was forced to reckon with one of the UK’s most battle-hardened, ruthless operators.
At this febrile juncture, Sunak required no less than a perfect campaign to even stand a chance of thwarting Reform’s rise.
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Operation Over
On 7 June, Rishi Sunak was forced to apologise after leaving D-Day commemorations early to film a pre-recorded interview for ITV.
Sunak’s statement of regret hit X/Twitter at 7.45 am. The prime minister had tried to get ahead of the story. But this was not the sort of story one can simply “get ahead” of.
The debacle spoke volumes about Rishi Sunak the politician. The prime minister saw no issue in curtailing his participation in the ceremonies, sending defence secretary Grant Shapps and foreign secretary Lord Cameron in his stead — nor, of course, did any of his inner circle of advisers and political aides. But the fallout was nothing short of brutal. Penny Mordaunt’s first contribution to the BBC election debate (Sunak again sent a surrogate) was to brand the prime minister “completely wrong” for his premature departure. Veterans, Mordaunt said, should be “treasured” as she highlighted her own credentials as a former defence secretary.
As political miscalculations go, the D-Day debacle was grimly perfect. On the doorstep, activists of all parties attested that Sunak’s absenteeism cut through. Labour could not have designed a scandal better placed to depress the Conservative base, whose morale had already been sapped by Sunak’s rolling gaffes. It cast further doubt over the prime minister’s judgement and values. And the episode made Keir Starmer, who publicised his participation in events widely, look more prime ministerial than ever.
But above all, the D-Day disaster was a gift to Nigel Farage. The Reform leader’s defining campaign mission was to exploit the grievances of traditionalist, nationalistic voters. Like Labour, the arch-political schemer couldn’t have devised a more politically propitious development.
Beyond the bunker
In the months leading up to the election, the only real consistent feature of Rishi Sunak’s political operation was its faith in, well, Rishi Sunak. Every fleeting phase of Sunakian rule was underpinned by an unshaken — and seemingly unshakeable — confidence in the ability of the man leading it. The Conservatives’ reset era, characterised by flailing and at times implausible emphases, was joined up by the prominence of the prime minister. Sunak, depending on his strategists’ vacillating whims, could symbolise freshness, stability, change and/or continuity — whatever the moment was deemed to demand.
But during the election, newly decamped from their Downing Street bunker, Sunak’s strategists were forced to confront the reality from which they were once so blissfully sheltered: their man could not save the Conservative Party.
This reckoning with reality, expedited by Sunak’s D-Day debacle, was epitomised by the calls to deprive Keir Starmer and Labour of a “super majority”.
The constitutionally nonsensical “super majority” tactic was no less than an election gambit of last resort — but resorted to just halfway through the campaign. It was evidence of the Conservative Party not only coming to terms with its woes — but learning to think pragmatically about them and adjusting its message accordingly. No longer mere loss minimisation — but extinction minimisation.
And as the campaign worsened, the Conservative rhetoric escalated. The “super majority” message won headlines — and so senior spokespeople felt incentivised to up the ante, warning consecutively of a “generation of Labour rule”, a “one-party socialist state” and “forever rule”.
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Closing with a ‘-gate’, on his way out
The stillness of the election campaign — as the inevitability of a Labour victory dawned across the political spectrum — was shattered in late June by “Gamble-gate”.
The prime minister’s decision to call a summer election took the vast majority of Westminster by surprise. But it soon emerged that two Conservative candidates, the party’s director of campaigns and a member of the PM’s security detail allegedly punted on Sunak doing exactly that.
Sunak’s defenders argued the prime minister could not control the actions of his aides or candidates. In this regard, addressing a BBC special Question Time programme, Sunak sought to embody the fury of the average voter: he spoke of his “immense anger” upon hearing of the allegations.
But Sunak still refused to suspend his ex-parliamentary private secretary Craig Williams or Laura Saunders as the Conservative candidates for Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr and Bristol North West respectively. The prime minister argued that the Gambling Commission investigations needed to be conducted and concluded without prejudice. Only then could any necessary action be taken.
It was not, however, the Gambling Commission’s job to pick the Conservative Party’s parliamentary candidates. Despite his defence, Sunak could have perfectly properly disavowed those facing criticism for their alleged election flutters. And he eventually did.
In the end, thirteen days separated Williams’ admission that he “put a flutter” on a summer election and Sunak’s decision to disavow him. The story was familiar: the Conservative Party had once again adopted an untenable line, repeated it constantly, and then — under the weight of political pressure — rowed back on it.
To this day, it remains nothing short of journalistic cliché to refer to Rishi Sunak as bad at politics. But the PM’s handling of “Gamble-gate” proved he wasn’t merely “bad” at campaigning — he was mind-bendingly, excruciatingly, captivatingly hopeless at it.
The meteor strikes
“An electoral meteor has now struck planet Earth”, New Labour architect Lord Mandelson told BBC News as the exit poll dropped at 10.00 pm on election night.
It was a direct evocation of the late Anthony King’s words, uttered in reaction to the 1997 exit poll. 27 years ago, King’s assessment would have shaken even the most assured Tory: “I offer you the following metaphor — this is an asteroid hitting the planet and destroying practically all life on Earth.”
According to the 2024 exit poll, the Conservative Party had been reduced to a mere 131-MP rump. Reality was even crueller. With every vote counted, the Tories won 121 seats; Labour won 411; and Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats won 72 — the party’s best performance in a century.
Reform UK won five MPs on 14 per cent of the vote — mostly at the Conservative Party’s expense. “Something is happening out there”, Nigel Farage uttered ominously throughout the campaign. He was right.
As was long foretold, the result deprived a veritable constellation of senior Tories of their parliamentary offices. Liz Truss, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps, Alex Chalk, Simon Hart, Gillian Keegan and Penny Mordaunt all featured among the night’s most notable “Portillo moments”.
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How the sun set on Rishi Sunak
The Conservative Party, the most historically rooted institution in British political history, found itself almost entirely unmoored from mainstream public opinion when Rishi Sunak took office in October 2022. The new PM’s task was to relocate public opinion and shift his party towards it. He might even do some governing.
The former prime minister failed.
Sunak vowed on the steps of Downing Street to lead a government defined by “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. His election campaign, just eighteen months later, was defined by successive rows over his non-attendance at a historically momentous commemoration and a scandal relating to alleged insider trading.
Narratively, the Conservative general election campaign began with a flurry of policies aimed at socially conservative voters, notably the national service and pension “triple lock plus” schemes. Over time it careered into constitutionally meaningless warnings of a Labour “super-majority” and its purportedly dire consequences. The Tory campaign’s downward trajectory mirrored the gradual-then-sudden decline of Sunak’s premiership.
The Rishi Sunak government (2022-2024) poses a classic analytical dilemma: how do we account for the PM’s agency to make bad decisions against a structural backdrop defined by a dire inheritance and insatiable factions? But there is, after all, no explanation for the inexorable decline of the Conservative Party that does not take account of Sunak’s repeated missteps as prime minister.
On the evidence of his premiership, an electoral thrashing and political irrelevance remain Rishi Sunak’s rightful lot.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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