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.
