I ought to have put money on it. When a downpour-drenched Rishi Sunak made his soggy start to this election, I suggested to you that the Tory campaign could simply unravel. So it has proved. What SpaceX might call “a rapid unscheduled disassembly” has left the forlorn Tory leader standing stranded in a heap of smoking wreckage.
The disintegration was epitomised by Thursday night’s set-piece encounter on the BBC between the prime minister and a studio audience. With the finishing post coming into view, here was one of the remaining opportunities for Mr Sunak to ask voters to take a fresh look at his party before they decide to hurl it from office and place a more searching focus on Sir Keir Starmer before he is installed in Downing Street with a potentially steamrolling majority. Rather than get on the front foot, yet again a punch-drunk prime minister was seen reeling backwards, this time over the betting scandal that is engulfing his party.
Their bitterest enemies couldn’t have done a better job of painting the Tories as rotten and idiotic chancers. The party’s director of campaigns, now on a “leave of absence”, is being probed by the Gambling Commission over betting on the timing of the election. So is his wife, a candidate in Bristol. Craig Williams, the Tory leader’s closest parliamentary aide, has already fessed up to wagering a £100 bet on the election date three days before it was announced. Since he stood to gain just £500, it is not so much the greed of it that stands out as the bovine stupidity of risking his reputation and jeopardising his boss’s campaign for such a relatively trivial sum. He is also being looked into by the Gambling Commission. “It just makes me weep with angry despair,” says one senior Conservative. “What are these people on?” Given the large spike in wagers on a July poll immediately before it was announced, Tories are braced for more of their number being identified as under investigation for what is a kind of insider trading. Even Michael Gove, who can usually be relied on to swear that black is white, has conceded that it “doesn’t look great”.
So much for the “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level” that Mr Sunak pledged to the country when he first moved into Downing Street. So much for his attempts to put distance between himself and the serial depravities of Boris Johnson’s time in Number 10. The betting business, the latest in the groaning pile of scandals that have accumulated during this Conservative era, will accentuate the prevalent belief that the Tories are a seedy and venal outfit with such an arrogant sense of entitlement that they don’t think any rules apply to them. The mood among staff at Tory headquarters, already bleak, has grown even more funereal. The only consolation they can cling to is that it can’t do too much damage to their ratings because they are already so dire.
Catastrophic or apocalyptic? That is the question that now divides Tories with 10 campaign days to go before polling stations open. Trudging through the slough of despond, the remaining optimists are those who think that the scale of their looming defeat may be contained to a 1997-style result. That was when Tony Blair secured a 179-seat majority for New Labour in a landslide that squelched the Conservatives down to just 165 MPs and sent them into a stretch in opposition that lasted for 13 years. Those Tories anticipating that kind of result can now be characterised as the cheerier sorts.
The fatalists are those who believe that they are careering towards an evisceration more severe than any previous defeat in the Conservative party’s long history. Three recent polls using the MRP method have suggested that they are headed for the crusher, with the most positive forecast leaving the Tories with 155 MPs and the least favourable reducing them to a rump of just 53. At that kind of level, it becomes conceivable that Sir Ed Davey is going to be the next leader of His Majesty’s Opposition.
I ought to report that there is a lot of wariness in both the blue and red camps about the most sensational of the poll projections. Some Conservative candidates, while acknowledging that their party is destined for a heavy beating, say their experiences “on the knocker” do not suggest we are on course for a Labour monster-majority. A former Tory cabinet minister scorns MRP polling as “voodoo science”. Senior members of Sir Keir’s team, while no longer trying to maintain the pretence that the race is close, say they are also unconvinced that opposition parties are going to hoover up hay bales of seats in areas that have been impregnably Conservative since they were led by the Duke of Wellington. One Starmer man recently suggested to me that there are what he called “silent Tories” lurking out there among the electorate who will rally to the Conservatives in sufficient numbers to save them from a wipeout. Note, though, that this is only a debate about whether the scale of the Tory defeat is going to be enormous or merely huge.
His fellow Tories will make Mr Sunak carry the can. Both because it is hypocritically convenient for the rest of the Conservative party to dump all the blame on him and because he’s given them the excuse to do so by presiding over such an atrocious campaign. He chose the timing, he picked the team and he has been the frontman. For the medal for most dreadful campaign of modern times, he has beaten Theresa May’s calamitous effort in 2017 and rivals the Labour low of Michael Foot’s 1983 “suicide note” election.
The Tory leader cannot point the finger at anyone but himself for the timing, because he, sneaking off to see the king without consulting the cabinet, chose July when he didn’t have to. Could the Conservatives have done better by waiting until the autumn or winter? We’ll never know, but they could hardly be doing worse than they are doing now. In making his decision to go when no one expected him to, he thought to wrong-foot Labour and the Lib Dems while catching out Reform. As it turned out, Labour and the Lib Dems, who had done a lot of preparatory work when they thought he might plump for a May election, were pretty much good to go. It was the Tories who hadn’t got their ducks, candidates, donors or policies in a row. Asked about how precisely his wheeze to bring back national service would work, Mr Sunak is still floundering around some weeks after he produced it. Rather than scotch Reform, going early flushed out Nigel Farage to play the role of smirking fire ship smashing into the side of the creaking Tory hulk.
The most cringeworthy pratfalls of the Conservative campaign, from the sodden launch on Downing Street to a photo opportunity in the Titanic shipyard to the self-inflicted D-day debacle, are on the leader. Last week the lampooning was for being unequal to the task of feeding a flock of Devon sheep.
Despite the Tories’ historical reputation for running a mean campaign machine, this one has failed to deliver its messages. One iteration of the Tory attack on Labour is that Sir Keir has “no plan”. Another version is that he has a sinister scheme to impose a generation-long, one-party socialist state on Britain that will tax everyone into the grave. The Labour leader can’t be both an empty vessel and a cunning conspirator, so the Tories haven’t persuaded voters he is either.
Few Conservatives ever expected to win this election, but they did hang on to the idea that Mr Sunak might sufficiently limit their losses to leave them as an effective opposition in the next parliament. Tory hopes of being competitive relied on them increasing voter nerves about a Starmer government while Labour went into this campaign seeking to make it a referendum on the Conservative record. At the most strategic level, it is Sir Keir, not Mr Sunak, who has got what he wanted.
The prime minister has a few remaining friends in his party and they will protest that the electorate was already lost to the Tories before the campaign started. Some say that, thanks to the recklessness of Liz Truss and the debaucheries of Boris Johnson, it was probably lost before Mr Sunak set foot in Number 10. Even if true, the most striking failure of his election is that it has been a vivid reminder of everything the voters had come to loathe about his party. Incompetent, shambolic, unbelievable and slicked with sleaze, the Tories have campaigned as badly as they have governed. It is an appropriate finale to their rule.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
