Britain awaits a wipeout election — Rishi Sunak has the manner of an expensive accountant overseeing a complicated bankruptcy proceeding

Letter from London:

*Because British politics cannot function without invoking the Second World War, Sunak was said to be running a “Dunkirk strategy”—a reference to the heroic evacuation of Allied forces from the beaches of northern France late in the spring of 1940.*

*This was unfortunate, because on June 6th, the eightieth anniversary of the D Day landings, Sunak chose to leave the commemorations on the beaches of northern France a few hours early, in order to get back in time for an interview on ITV News.*

*During the same interview that he was so keen to get back for, Sunak, whose father worked as a family physician for the N.H.S. and whose mother worked as a pharmacist, was asked what sacrifices he had had to undergo as a child. “All sorts of things,” he said, a couple of times, before settling on Sky TV, a satellite entertainment package.*

*After D Day, the Tories’ Dunkirk strategy began to look more like the retreat from Moscow. Two candidates, including the wife of the Party’s campaign director, were among a number of people investigated by the authorities for allegedly placing illicit bets on the date of the election, before it was announced publicly.*

*James Cracknell, a former Olympic rower who is standing for the Conservatives in Colchester, described his own party as “a shower of shit.”*

*The beneficiary of all this—and the heir to an almighty mess—is Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party.*

 

*Starmer’s singular political achievement has been to reverse the Party’s leftward turn under Corbyn. “When you lose that badly, you don’t look to the voters and say, ‘What on earth do you think you were doing?’ ” he had told an audience, the previous night, in Grimsby. “You look at your party and say, ‘We have to change.’”*

*In this election, Starmer has elevated political expediency to a point of high principle. He uses the formulation “Country first, Party second” to describe his thinking on any given issue, including his decision to abandon most of the left-leaning promises (such as nationalizing the country’s energy, rail, and water systems) that enabled him to become leader of the Labour Party in the first place.*

*The centerpiece of the Labour manifesto is wealth creation. “If you take nothing else away from today, let it be this,” Starmer said. “This changed Labour Party has a plan for growth: we are pro-business and pro-worker.” Engels it ain’t.*

*I asked [Labour candidate] Reynolds how people were expressing their feelings on the doorstep, and she said that mostly they articulated a daily sense of struggle.*

*“It’s more the cost of living, local public services, the country’s in a mess,” she recounted. “Our challenge is to say, ‘We’ve got a plan, we can do something about this.’ But some people are just, like, ‘None of you can do anything.’”*

*And that is the question that lies on the other side of this week’s election wipeout: how much hope does Britain have left?*

It won’t be a “wipeout”. Labour will have a massive majority, yes. But the Tories will still be the opposition and Reform will still have 1 seat at most. Nothing actually changes.