It was a thoroughly British affair: damp, badly staged, and half-arsed. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, took advantage of what looked like a break in the rain to emerge from No. 10 and announce that there would be a general election on July 4.
As he spoke, the downpour began again in earnest, soaking his suit. Then some Labour activists started blasting out the theme song from Tony Blair’s victorious 1997 campaign, “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream.
“Who do you trust?” the bedraggled PM asked, looking earnest as the drops formed on his immaculate hair. “Thi-i-ings can only get beddah!” boomed the loudspeakers.
Ever since British people started watching The West Wing 25 years ago, we have had a sense that American politicians are not just slicker than our own but somehow more elevated. Wednesday’s weather, as in some literary pathetic fallacy, summarized our national mood. After 14 years, people blame every blemish in their lives on the Conservatives. But there is no enthusiasm for the alternative.
We won’t be torn on the fourth of July. But we’ll be worn on the fourth of July, pessimistic, irritable and resigned. We will almost certainly give Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s dullsville leader, a large majority. But, on some level, we already know we will immediately start regretting it. Ah, well. Things can only get wetter.
It is hard not to feel sorry for Rishi Sunak. He is a clever, charming man, in politics for all the right reasons. But he took over just as the public was giving up on his party.
When Boris Johnson was ousted in 2022, the Conservatives were 7 points behind in the polls, not a bad position for a governing party two years into a parliament. Now that deficit has grown to 20. It turns out that voters really don’t like having new prime ministers handed down to them by parliamentary cliques. Sadly, by the time Sunak took over, it had happened twice in three months, all without a general election. People want to take it out on someone, and now they have their chance.
At the same time, voters have repressed the memory of the lockdowns that they themselves demanded throughout 2020 and 2021. Instead of seeing the subsequent tax rises and price rises as the consequence of paying people to stay home, they imagine they are somehow the product of Tory incompetence. They don’t expect things to be any better under Starmer, but they still want a scapegoat, a sin-eater. Ironically, Sunak was more anti-lockdown than 90% of the country, but, in a neat symbol of the entire election, no one cares.
And so, with an irony that will blow the collective mind of the New York Times, just as the European Union turns to parties of the authoritarian Right, Brexit Britain will be almost alone in electing a party of the traditional Left. As European countries pursue various schemes to send illegal immigrants to safe third countries in Africa, Britain’s incoming Labour government will scrap the first such scheme. Funny how things work out.
Why pick this moment? After all, the election could legally have come as late as January 2025, and there were all sorts of reasons for waiting. The post-lockdown spasm of inflation has finally subsided, leaving room for tax cuts before the end of the year. Tories tend to do better in winter (possibly because, according to behavioral psychologists, being cold, or having a cold, makes people more worried about crime and immigration and so more right-wing). In any case, you never know — something might turn up.
I think the explanation lies in The West Wing, specifically the episode where an adviser reminds the apparently doomed President Bartlett of a line from the 1968 movie The Lion in Winter (though the movie is not named). As the princes wait to be murdered in a closet, Richard, played by Anthony Hopkins, stands up straight. “My, you chivalric fool,” his cynical brother says, “as if the way one fell down mattered.”
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“When the fall is all there is,” Richard replies, “it matters.”
From the moment he became prime minister, Sunak has been in the shadow of events: the feuding in his party, the lockdown hangover, the spike in energy prices. By going early, he has at last seized the initiative. He has evidently made up his mind that if he is going down, he will go down on his own terms, a patriot trying to the last to serve his country. When the fall is all there is, it matters.
