Cut your losses short and let your winners run. It’s the oldest cliche on Wall Street, and, at heart, Rishi Sunak is more of a banker than a politician. So, in retrospect, perhaps we should have guessed how he would react to the current collapse in the Conservative party’s share price.
His bet on turning the country around hasn’t worked out, so he’s unwinding his position; dumping his stocks and getting out. On Wednesday, Sunak had the air of a man who is tired of waiting for the inevitable and would rather get it over with. What he doesn’t seem to have realised – although judging by their seasick expressions as they lined up behind him, plenty of his cabinet ministers have – is how much politics is not like banking. Cutting and running now, against the reported advice of the Tories’ election guru, Isaac Levido, is a tacit admission that things are not going to get better; that, if anything, they are likely to get worse. And just like that, he has effectively turned his campaign into a public admission of failure.
By breakfast time on day one of the campaign, Sunak had already conceded that “we haven’t made the progress on NHS waiting lists I would have liked”, and that flights to Rwanda would not in fact be taking off before the election. (Though Nigel Farage isn’t formally standing for election this time, having lost seven times in a row, expect him to make hay with that on the Reform party’s behalf as the peak season for small boat crossings gets under way in June.) By the afternoon, the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, was describing Boris Johnson’s regime as “the worst governing ever seen” to the Covid inquiry, in case any voters happened to have forgotten Partygate. It’s as though someone had actively arranged a campaign around all the things voters are angriest about.
What next? Well, lights are flashing red all over the criminal justice system: this week it emerged that police chiefs privately discussed asking forces to delay arrests because the jails were too full, thanks to the Tories failing either to build more cell space or reform sentencing in time. Prisoners are already being released early to ease hellish overcrowding, and from this week some sentences will be cut short by up to 70 days, to victims’ understandable distress.
Yet this campaign will not be a slam-dunk for Labour. For a start, all these problems will most likely be theirs to solve by 5 July, and it may be only when and if they get the keys to the Treasury that they understand exactly why Sunak chose to leave when he did. Inflation is down but not necessarily out, with speculation about an autumn rebound, and borrowing figures this month were worse than expected. On top of everything else it will be struggling to afford, a new Labour government will now need to find billions for the rightly generous compensation for victims of the infected blood scandal, announced by Sunak on what we know now was his way out of the door.
Though Wednesday’s election announcement took them by surprise, the slickness of Keir Starmer’s initial launch suggests his team are as ready as they’ll ever be for a campaign they have war-gamed intensively, though they have still to finish selecting candidates in dozens of seats (including Islington North, where Jeremy Corbyn is tipped to run as an independent).
But Labour thinking still looks unfinished in some key manifesto areas, the party remains uncomfortably divided over Gaza, and Angela Rayner still faces an ongoing police investigation into the sale of her old council house. Starmer’s rather remote leadership style, which leaves colleagues struggling sometimes to work out what he wants, is meanwhile a potential weakness in a campaign where snap decisions have to be taken fast, under pressure, by a team scattered around the country.
But for now these problems pale in comparison with a Tory leader who pitched himself as the man to clear up the Tory mess but is now quitting with the job at best half finished, in order to lead his mutinous party on what looks like a suicide mission.
By going for the summer election almost nobody expected, Sunak maximised the one advantage he had left, that of surprise. Yet, instead of catching his enemies off balance, somehow he has ended up managing to wrongfoot his own side, resulting in the kind of baffled backbench rage at Downing Street’s apparent ineptitude that makes you wonder if the inevitable postmortem can be suppressed until polling day.
That he seemingly went to the palace to seek the dissolution of parliament before telling his own cabinet what was happening is a telling illustration of how little trust he has in his colleagues not to leak, or even try some wild last-minute insurrection. Now the cold hard fury of some of his own MPs, particularly those who don’t have the Sunak family riches to cushion an expected fall, may well dog him to polling day and beyond.
But in choosing not to hang on till the bitter end, Sunak has done the right thing for a country that has had more than enough of all this psychodrama, and the right thing, too, perhaps, for his family. He has made his choice, and it was to cut his losses. Now let the winner run.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
