Britain's prime minister calls an election in the rain

On 22 May, Rishi Sunak stood in the rain outside 10 Downing Street and called a general election for 4 July, the first British summer election since 1945. The setting was unintentionally perfect: a prime minister soaked through, announcing a vote he was widely expected to lose, with the music of D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, the anthem of Labour’s 1997 landslide, blasting from a nearby campaign bus. Whether the song was a coincidence or a provocation, it captured the mood of the moment better than any poll.

The decision was described, in the days that followed, as a gamble. The Conservatives trailed Labour by around twenty points in most national surveys, a deficit built over months of stagnant living standards, strikes, and the chaos of the party’s revolving door of leaders. Sunak’s calculation, such as it was, rested on the hope that the economy was turning: inflation had fallen to 2.3 per cent, near target, and the spring had brought a stream of tax cuts and policy announcements designed to frame a story of recovery. Calling the election in May, rather than waiting until the autumn, would deny his opponents time to build their own narrative, and would force a vote while the news cycle still favoured the government.

That calculation was immediately put under pressure. Within a day of the announcement, Sunak had to concede that two flagship policies, the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and the phased smoking ban, would not become law before the vote. The admission handed Labour a theme that it used for the rest of the campaign: a government out of ideas, calling an election to avoid the embarrassment of failing its own promises in office. The rain on the day of the announcement, and the anthem behind it, gave the moment a kind of stage-managed pathos that the Conservative machine could not scrub.

What is easy to forget, looking at the polls, is that the election was not a foregone conclusion in the way the coverage implied. Turnout, tactical voting and the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system all had work to do, and the Labour lead, while large, was softer than its headline numbers suggested, concentrated in places where the party needed it least. The more durable question was demographic: the Conservatives had won their 2019 majority on a coalition of older, rural and Leave-voting England, and two years of economic pain had frayed exactly that coalition. The election would test not whether Labour could win, but whether the Conservative coalition could survive as a governing force at all.

It is also worth saying that the decision to go early was a defensive one, and everyone knew it. Sunak had spent fourteen months as prime minister trying to govern without a majority of his own party’s confidence; the election was the only move left that put the initiative, however briefly, back in his hands. In a system where prime ministers choose their moment, the moment chosen was the wettest one available, and the image of the soaked leader became the campaign’s first poster. The gamble was not irrational; it was just, as gambles usually are, more likely to fail than to succeed. Britain would go to the polls on 4 July, and the rain on 22 May had already told the country which way the wind was blowing.