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.”
His lectern disaster has been variously waved away as a thing that could have happened to anybody. He couldn’t do it indoors because it would have lacked authority. He couldn’t have had an umbrella because he would have been called a “wally with a brolly”. Commentators wrestle to make it make sense; it has to. How can you commentate a match without rules, or a ball? And yet, no: he stood before the nation, bedraggled, beseeching, like a man begging to be put out of his misery. A man seeking victory would have avoided that.
On to Derbyshire, where he thought Tory councillors could be camouflaged as regular voters by dressing them in hi-vis bibs. Then to Northern Ireland, where people couldn’t vote for him even if they wanted to because he’s not fielding any candidates, and he chose a precinct, the Titanic Quarter, as if begging journalists to ask him about sinking ships. There was time for a quick photo op on a plane, garlanded by signs that said “exit”.
After only 72 hours – though, to be fair, it must have felt like years – he took the unusual decision to retire from campaigning and think. Was it blue-sky thinking, or was he sitting in front of ChatGPT, prompting: “Ideas Reform voters – who think they fought a world war, but were actually three years old – will like”? He emerged with a plan even the army hated – bringing back national service, for a generation who have been kaleidoscopically betrayed by successive Tory governments.
Sunak underscored how very serious he was about the policy by saying that he would be happy to see his daughters, born in 2011 and 2013, do national service. He was asking us to believe in a world where he wins this election; he is able to enact this astronomically expensive policy that everyone hates; he remains in power, or at least in the UK, for the next seven years; and his daughters, who definitely won’t be living in California by then, will be conscripted.
But is he really asking us to believe that completely ludicrous sequence of events? This whole fandango makes a lot more sense if he is actually trying to lose. Foregrounding yourself in the first place, when you are sharing the all-time record low approval rating with John Major, from 1994, is not the decision of a man who wants to win. While any individual mishap could look like bad luck, the sheer buildup of them, the unforced errors, the repeated ones, the elegant rhythm as each pratfall is eclipsed by the next – it all looks so deliberated that we have to at least admit the possibility that it is deliberate.
There is an interesting phrase that Sunak keeps using, which is that Keir Starmer “thinks he can just waltz into Downing Street”. It is as if the Labour leader were somehow illegitimate in contesting the election, a bit of a chancer. You want to sit Sunak down and explain how this democracy lark works; if enough people vote for you, then, yes, you are indeed the rightful holder of the office, and therefore entitled to waltz – or, if you prefer, walk normally – into its residence. Sunak should know that, except he did waltz into Downing Street without the preliminaries. Now he looks, talks and acts like a man trying to waltz back out.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 27 May 2024 to reflect the fact that the Tory councillors in hi-vis vests were present during Rishi Sunak’s visit to a warehouse in Derbyshire, not Wales.
