Why Has Rishi Sunak Called an Election?

The day began with a peculiar news story. Enough to get the antennae of conspiracy theorists twitching, Oliver Dowden told the country to stock up in case of catastrophe. Or was it a message to Tory MPs and their support staff, knowing most will be out of a job from 5th July? Being prepared is a message Rishi Sunak should have taken on board as well. Defying weather forecasts and the evidence of his own senses, the Prime Minister eschewed the expensive Downing Street press room to stand in the rain, knowing his words would likely be drowned out by protestors. It was not the most auspicious of beginnings to an election campaign that spells doom for the Tories.

The announcement did catch the lobby on the hop. That was until the rumours started swirling this morning. Since the miserable showing in the locals and mayorals, it seemed Sunak, like Boris Johnson, was going to cling on for dear life in the hope that something might turn up. So why he change of mind? Whatever you think of Theresa May and Johnson, they had a plausible argument for going to the polls. The former argued she needed a healthy majority to deal with the job at hand. The latter was to break the Brexit logjam. Sunak doesn't have anywhere near as compelling a story. In his tediously overlong speech, he said inflation was back to normal levels and economic recovery was underway. There are some global dangers too, which is why we need a Conservative government at the helm. Not terribly convincing even for Tories, if the comments on Conservative Home are typical.

We've had the good reason, so what's the real reason? Snaking its way down the grapevine, it's because the Tories are in a poor state and it can only get worse. With two recent defections, chances are more pain was in store as other Tories fancied an afterlife as either a Labour MP or some very important hanger on. Not great for morale. More Channel boats and Rwanda frustrations couldn't be ruled out, nor could the possibility of Tory support sinking further. Still, there are those in the Tory camp who were counselling as late as Wednesday morning that going for a Summer election was a mistake. Yes, the argument went, things are definitely bad now but they might be a touch better come November. When the priority has to be salvaging as much as the party as possible, fortune favours the cautious, not the foolhardy. As such, The Spectator are now running an article called A summer election is suicide for the Tories. It couldn't happen to a nicer party.

There was an event earlier this week that was widely reported pointing to the essential context of going for an election now. True to form, its significance was passed over by the country's professional politics understanderers. Senior Tories forced Sunak to back down on his immigration plans. By counting overseas students as immigrants and then introducing restrictive visa requirements, he and the right of the party were hoping to demonstrate the toughness and efficacy of the Tories at driving the numbers down. This with the happy by-product of plunging universities into financial crisis and with it (hopefully) cutting students who graduate into a life-long habit of voting liberal-left. Unfortunately for Sunak, not only does the HE sector carry weight in terms of votes, the economies servicing universities - particularly the large amount of propertied capital tied up in student lets, residence schemes, and expanding/replacing HE estate - is a core component of the Tory class coalition. The rebellion in the Cabinet was the assertion of interests over a party that was in danger of again becoming disarticulated from them in pursuit of policy gimmicks. A smaller scale version of the disaster that Liz Truss brought on herself.

On top of this, how the mega rich are deserting the Tories and are now in bed with Labour cannot have escaped Sunak's notice. He knows the paralysis of his government, the harms done to Britain's soft power, the decrepitude of the state, its growing inability to discipline the workforce, its reckless approach to so-called business confidence (I.e. providing British capital a stable enough regulatory regime for accumulation), and complete lack of popular legitimacy in and of itself is a barrier to the smooth running of things. His own eyes, the reports of donations pouring into Labour, the feedback channelled to him from those Tories on the London restaurant/dinner party/City canapé circuit, and his own class interests as the country's richest politician set on forging an alliance between daddy-in-law's Indian IT business and the Californian tech bros are the economics concentrated in his political decision making. Sunak's bowing to inevitable defeat is because the pressure of settled bourgeois interest is against him, and doing so now means he personally can look forward to a soft landing. The same cannot be said for his party, as it drops from a great height onto the rocks of a hard political reckoning.