For a man who wants to win an election, Rishi Sunak’s first week of campaigning has been bizarre, a little bit frightening, like getting trapped in someone else’s anxiety dream. He went to the king for signoff before he told the cabinet, and presented 4 July to them as a fait accompli. Even if they had agreed with the decision, they wouldn’t have liked that, but they didn’t and they hated it. Only Oliver Dowden thought it was a good idea, which is a category of disaster all its own: “things only Oliver Dowden thinks are a good idea”.
So Sunak enters the fray alone. I’ve genuinely never seen a prime minister so isolated, so undefended. I can almost hear David Attenborough narrating over each appearance: “Separated from his herd, the antelope has just days to escape the plain before the hyenas catch his scent.”
