The symbolism of Sunak’s GE announcement is amazing

by Martin Odoni

So it is a summer General Election after all. I do not claim to understand the thinking behind the decision. Maybe Rishi Sunak is just hoping the damage done to Keir Starmer by his appalling response to the Gaza crisis can weaken Labour’s likely majority.

I cannot claim to be terribly excited at the prospect of this Election. Even Ed Miliband’s tour de caution leadership had 2015 looking like there might be something different to emerge that year. But this time I can honestly say that there really is no worthwhile difference between the two big parties.

Not a good start by the Tories

But we can still take amusement at posturing careerists fouling up and making fools of themselves, and any superstitious Tory MPs will not be thanking Sunak for the manner in which the date of the Election was announced today. The symbolism of Sunak’s announcement absolutely screams “disaster incoming” for the Conservatives, for surely the last thing a Prime Minister wants when announcing a General Election was for it to be raining torrentially all over him; the metaphor almost literally of being ‘p*ssed all over’ when the polls still look calamitous for the Tories is inadvertently hilarious. Oh sure, I realise the Tories cannot control the weather, but could they not have someone stand out there with him and hold an umbrella over him?

And then of course, the date chosen for the General Election is the 4th of July. In the USA of course, that is Independence Day. Just a day after Andrew Feinstein announced he was standing as an Independent in Starmer’s constituency, the General Election is timed for “Independents’ Day”?

Now, as much as I imagine Sunak would like to see Starmer have a bad night on the 4th of July, a real left-wing Independent like Feinstein winning in Holborn would be a massive stimulus for the British left (which the two main parties quietly collaborated over destroying when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader). I do not think Sunak was trying to create luck for the left, at least not consciously. But he has associated the Election with the word “Independence” at precisely the time that the British left are forming a non-party network of Independent candidates. He may well have created that bit of left wing luck without realising.

Today, we celebrate our Independence Day! Independence from Neoliberalism? Not with Starmer around

This is not an example of good Public Relations work on Sunak’s part, and it has made an already hopelessly inept Tory Party look like their leader is powerlessly at the mercy of events.

Yes, Prime Minister could not have made it up.