UK’s summer election: what effect will the timing have on voters?

A woman arrives at a polling station in Tower Hamlets, London, on 6 May 2021. Photograph: Vickie Flores/EPA

Summer elections are hardly new – Theresa May crisscrossed the country claiming to be “strong and stable” in June 2017, and Jeremy Corbyn celebrated cutting her majority by taking to the stage at Glastonbury.

But the last time the UK went to the polls in July was the historic postwar election of 1945, two months after the celebrations of VE Day.