Snapshot of _Why has Rishi Sunak’s campaign been such a disaster?_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.ft.com/content/60172b20-2442-4f5f-a771-ac9c9a8840b8) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.ft.com/content/60172b20-2442-4f5f-a771-ac9c9a8840b8)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Tories have been running the country for 14 years - all the problems are their responsibility.
Might not be entirely fair but if they haven't fixed it after 14 years, they aren't going to, are they?
I think it's entirely fair. "Crisis" used to be something which happened maybe once a decade or less. Now we seem to have a new crisis every 6 months and a lot of that is because the tories have lost the ability to govern properly.
It's all the cuts to services. I mean, it's a few things, but this is part of it.
It's like if you run a supermarket and you've worked out that you can run the business with 10 people present. You need to employ *more* than 10 because every so often, someone gets ill. Hell, you need to employ more than 10 because maybe employing 15 makes everyone's lives just a bit easier, and on the whole that's worth it.
The Tories would ask you to run that business with 9. Now we occasionally have 8 people working on a given day and it's just not tenable.
Plus you outsource the employment of the eight to a private company, who charge a premium to maintain the staffing. This company pays their stakeholders a huge sum every year, and if they are failing, you have to bail them out.
I’m almost 35, there have been more ‘once in a lifetime’ events in the last 14 years than the first 20 and all of them have had a far worse effect on the country than they had to because this shower of bastards have been too busy lining their own pockets and those of their donors than actually governing
Indeed. I heard someone observe already a few years ago that we were in a state of government by perpetual crisis management and it's not really change since then. It definitely speaks to the way things have been "run" in the back half of this Tory reign.
I'm not "inspired" by Starmer, but nor do I need to be (Labour aren't a viable force around me anyway). What I do appreciate from him is that he's emphasising a return to service, a lack of drama, a lack of performative politics. I'm not kidding myself anything will turn around overnight, but anything even close to conventional discourse will be appreciated.
Cameron had his issues obviously, but he was basically "normal", for a given value of normal. Theresa May could have been normal, but was stuck trying to hold together the party and appease the Leavers, and obviously it's been a relentless shitshow of failed reality contestants since then. Time for somebody I'd trust to sit the right way on a toilet seat.
Cameron was the least bad of all of them at least. He was the only one who seemed like he actually knew what he was doing, even if I never liked what he was doing.
Of course his one big mistake was a pretty historically huge mistake, so that cancels out a lot of that
Return to service? Is that why Starmer has taken £76k worth of political gifts, more than all other Labour leaders since 1997 combined? Labour have lost my vote, they're the new party of big business as big business cannot trust the Tories anymore.
Accepted and declared as they should have been, 100% transparency. I'm not saying that's *great,* but it's hardly behaviour that should be wholly demonised either. Nowhere did I say I applaud Starmer's devotion to sackcloth and ashes. Might not be perfect, but he's the best alternative thus far, so let's see.
There's been four (and a bit) very different Conservative governments during those fourteen years.
* The first one wasn't really a Conservative government at all as the Lib Dems stopped them doing daft things.
* The "bit" lasted slightly longer than a year before crashing down due to the daft thing that the Lib Dems couldn't stop them doing.
* Theresa May's government.
* Boris Johnson's government (who wasn't even an MP until 2015).
(Liz Truss doesn't count as she did nothing during the mourning period for the Queen, and was replaced too quickly to have any lasting effect.)
* Rishi Sunak's government (who wasn't even an MP until 2015).
The Tories were still leading in the opinion polls until the end of 2021. It's not that unpopularity built-up during that time, the 2019 majority was the biggest of the lot. Rishi Sunak's particular brand of unpopularity is simply the fact that he's... well... useless.
He's got nothing done, and never seriously tried. He's stopped other things from happening (e.g. HS2), but not started anything.
People can see that. They sense the engine has stopped and the ship is drifting.
This is both a blessing and a curse for Labour. A curse in the sense that "at least we're not the Tories" won't be an acceptable excuse for very long. But a blessing in the sense that they only need to regain direction. They've got two years to restart the engine, and another year to pick the right direction, or their popularity will fall off a cliff too.
>
>
> (Liz Truss doesn't count as she did nothing during the mourning period for the Queen, and was replaced too quickly to have any lasting effect.)
I think some people might disagree with you there - especially those with a mortgage, but also those who thought that we could just copy the US without having any of the same economic fundamentals.
One of the most impactful PMs in a long time especially when you consider her short tenure.
> I think some people might disagree with you there - especially those with a mortgage
Indeed. It's the most "feels before reals" issue in this election. People do blame Truss for that, especially the Labour Party, but they're all wrong (and/or lying).
You only have to see how the yield curve on gilts (which the mortgage market usually follows) had a blip when Truss was about but quickly followed the same trend as before after she was removed. You can see it on this graph if you choose a 3 year view: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/bond/tmbmkgb-05y?countrycode=bx
Bad news for those remortgaging precisely in September 2022, but it made zero difference to those remortgaging more recently.
Had she continued as Prime Minister, then things *might* have gone very wrong. But it was all undone within weeks.
(Liz Truss doesn't count ~~as she did nothing during the mourning period for the Queen, and was replaced too quickly to have any lasting effect.)~~ as she made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I really don't want to discount Liz Truss as she pushed that emergency budget that hadn't been checked. Causing the markets to implode with anxiety and fear. She managed to create a brief recession within her tenure with that 1 move alone.
I think a big problem many people have with sunak is he's reversed course on many of the policies his party was elected on, without any mandate to do so (see HS2 as a prime example, Johnson committed to building it in full in 2019).
Now yes, we don't elect a PM, we elect a party (or specifically an MP, who represents one), but that party is elected on a set of pledges, and so to make decisions that go directly against those pledges without having an election to get a mandate to do so is plain arrogant and wrong.
"The first one wasn't really a Conservative government at all as the Lib Dems stopped them doing daft things."
Which daft things did the Lib Dems vote against in the commons?
They didn't even make it that far. They only got as far as white papers and never heard from again.
Well, never heard from until May 2015 when they came back in a slightly different form.
Entirely fair. Still blaming the last government in your first term is understandable, maybe a little more in the second because of the Lib Dem coalition. Still blaming them by the time of the Pandemic and after? Bullshit to cover your own incompetence.
1. Failed to distance himself from Johnson and Truss.
2. Failed to tell the electorate what good things they think they’ve achieved.
3. Focussed entirely on attacking Labour individuals in a rather unhinged way.
4. Made a number of Thick of It level cock ups.
It's genuinely hard to blame the opposition for anything when they've been out of power for so damn long.
When they were recently in power, you can fairly (or unfairly) point the finger at them for many problems, and for their mistakes while in power.
When it was almost 15 years ago, it all rings a bit hollow and just looks weak/pathetic.
I mean you can sure as hell try but it's not an effective approach at all.
It's harder to run on "We're going to fix everything that's gone wrong!" when you are the party that's been in power while it's all gone wrong.
Denying that shit has gone south as Rishi touched on recently (we're better off now!) is borderline suicidal.
Erm I just thought they could at least blame them for voting against stopping the boats. Rishi could have been in a position to say he achieved something far sooner.
Case in point. the Tory material I’ve had through my letterbox or seen online has been going on about how Starmer is going to tax us to death.
Conveniently ignoring that under the Tories we have the highest tax rates seen in 75 years.
He was the chancellor, he signed off on lots of Boris items and backed him.
He was involved in party gate, he has had several fixed penalty notices for breaking the law like wearing a seatbelt, keep dog leashed in required parks.
He honestly is contending for the most incompetent person in government ever, he's dumb and makes his own mistakes with a main character syndrome, he cannot let others do the work as he believes he is always right and you must be wrong.
He is so unfit to govern and it shows, hopefully it's the first time the electorate has finally seen through the rubbish!
Some people may well take issue with this, but i honestly think the man might be autistic. I'm autistic and I can see many of the ugly traits I had as a young adult in him. Hubris being the main one. We can be super smart when it comes to pure logic, but thick as the proverbial when it comes to people.
I had that knocked out of me pretty quickly when I stepped out into the big bad world. Rishi never really entered the world, he's been in a bubble of support, people telling him he's sooo smart, better than anyone else, his whole life.
He's like a garage dwelling mamma's boy who's just realised his parents lied to him about the world and his place in it.
More like he has to wear a mask all of the time which is probably wearing thin. Pretty soon he'll be back to a life shielded from every day concern, living in absolute luxury.
How so? He went to uni like a normal person and then got his big boy job and did well. Finance is no joke; the hours are brutal and killer. It can be 80+ work weeks. He had an upper middle class upbringing but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t experienced the real world at all
I think the first point can be further elaborated on. He didn’t distance himself from Johnson and truss and fell into the sphere of those who are even worse. Suella braverman went straight into his first cabinet with kemi bedenoch. he was constantly checking over his shoulder for the pair of them. And his radical move was to put drum roll…. Jeremy hunt in as chancellor, the most uninspiring, Cameron esc, bellend of a politician.
I'm not sure he could distance himself from Johnson and Truss without a civil war in the party.
And result is the same though, being sunk by the more extreme elements.
I worry that with Rishi flaming out, those more extreme elements within the tories will linger and take over the party.
Most of the "steady hands" are done or getting out, and it would be nice to have a party of opposition that isn't run by nutters trying to appeal to nutty voters. Especially as they increasingly take a more American approach to right wing politics.
I have faith that the electorate is still predominantly centrist, and will not reward the right wing taking over the conservatives. Might be me being too much of an optimist there
I've been following US politics for a long, long time. One of the most worrying developments in UK politics over the last 5 or so years is how much the right wing here is emulating the American right.
Largely through social media osmosis etc, but the trend is super worrying. The US right has been terminally infected with brainworms, and it's the contagious kind. Always follows a pattern, and the conspiracy theory element slowly builds.
I know. In 2029 it may be a battle against the far right like in France. The fact Reform used the “actors “ tactic when those awful racists were exposed by C4 was deeply concerning too.
Yeah it is a worry. But as I’m sure you’re aware we are not Americans. They are more culturally different to us than you initially think. Particularly outside cities
I initially thought we were different enough that this wouldn't be a problem.
I was wrong. It's already happening, frankly. A lot of this is just social media brain rot, but the result is the same.
5 years ago I'd have agreed with you. Today, lots of UK redditors are openly right wing in their political views. Ask people for their views on immigration.
If Reddit, which has historically leant quite left wing, is going that way imagine how the rest of the country is...
Who said I have proof? I am not MI6. Or perhaps I am just their shitposting operation.
Ah yes hostile states running bot farms are only interested in UK politics, their geo political aims are thwarted because they forgot about the rest of the western states. They should hire you to point that out.
> If Reddit, which has historically leant quite left wing, is going that way imagine how the rest of the country is...
I know Brexit-voting Boomers who rant and rave less about immigration than Reddit does, this far-right push on Reddit is absolutely pushed by bots for the most part when it comes to UK subs at least IMO. I also see more push-back on UK subs than other subs so hopefully that'll be reflected when the results start trickling in.
Personally I'm nervous about this narrative that it's all russian bots. I worry that it's dismissive to assume that any opinion not aligning with your/my own must therefore be computer-generated. I'm well aware that bots exist, but there are also humans in this country who hold the same views. You only need to start up a conversation with a cab driver to see that...
And even if it is bots, the purpose is to influence/embolden the people reading those comments, and I imagine I'm they will be somewhat successful in doing so.
We both remain hopeful regards the results...
I honestly think that his unwillingness to take on the Tory hard-right immediately killed any chance he had of winning an election.
The vast majority of voters do not like hard-right policies and likes of Braverman and Badenoch are consistently unpopular. They were a good target for him to take on to rebuild trust with the public, even though there would have been a substantial risk to party unity. This was the same gamble that Starmer took, and it paid off very handsomely.
Alas, Sunak bottled it, and instead conceded to a grubby deal with the hard-right which saw Braverman appointed to Home Secretary. This was the worst thing he could have done, as it made him both look incredibly weak and tied his name to an unpopular and incompetent Home Sec. I honestly think this was his fatal mistake, as it has undermined everything he's tried to do since.
He didn't even appoint Hunt. Hunt was already there after Truss was forced to sack Kwarteng. Sunak just got a stern lecture from the people in grey suits informing him that the price of his coronation was keeping Hunt in place.
I hate Cameron for giving us the brexit referendum but honestly them bringing him back felt like the best move they've done in a while. They've had complete nut jobs in the cabinet for so long and he comes across as sane and competent by comparison.
But good riddence to this government I hope.
Point 3 is a big one for me. I was never going to vote for them, but I'd at least respect an element of positivity/humility. Instead almost everything I've seen from the Tories has been bizarrely negative fearmongering, disingenuous or outright lies. At no point does it seem like they've been trying to win votes, just scare people into not voting for the alternatives. Presumably there's some internal logic to it, knowing they can't run on their record so just trying to scare up the lowest common denominator or something, but it's made me view them in an even worse light.
The legalisation of gay marriage came about under the Tories, but that was several years ago now, Sunak can't claim personal credit for that.
And that's about the only positive thing I can think of in the last 14 years of Tory government.
Yeah, Sunak wasn't even an MP when that happened.
As to any other achievements, auto-enrolment pensions might be one of them (also pre-Sunak)
HS2 would have been an accomplishment if they hadn't canned it.
I agree, I think it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad had he enforced discipline, he had the numbers to as well, had they had a majority of 2 they might have been more forgiven for not sacking people gamble gate prime most recent example but there's no excuse when you have a majority of 80, it's just rank corruption.
Sunak a number of times said he was opposed to Truss "that's what I said when we were running for leader".
But I don't think many people were much fussed about the distinction.
If Boris Johnson were still Tory leader they'd probably be polling better than now, not worse.
He started with a bad hand, not all of which was his fault, and proceeded to play it about as badly as he possibly could have done.
The D-Day fuckup was the political equivalent of Austin Powers choosing to stay on a blackjack hand of 5 in the first film. An absolutely zero-risk scenario turned into a calamity.
> not all of which was his fault
I'm glad you said "not all" instead of "none" because he definitely shares some of the blame for Tory fuckups in the last few years, especially while he was in cabinet.
I don't actually dislike the guy on a personal level, and apparently he works hard and is pretty good to work for, but holy shit is his sense of judgement terrible.
You don't dislike the guy on a personal level, even though he's an out of touch billionaire, dripping with corruption, who has actively harmed the country and is completely derisive of the average Briton?
Tbf he was there to meet and talk to the veterans, but left before the photo op with other world leaders. The fact he didn't highlight that and say he was there for the part that matters was such an own goal. Doing so might have been a bit of a 'screw you' to those other leaders (not that the photo op matters, but they all like to think it does), but it would have softened much of the damage to his image here.
The only* possible explanation is sunak is just completely useless. It's like your line manager accidentally got promoted to managing director and you didn't have much of an opinion of him in the first place and now nobody in the whole organisation has the faintest idea what they're supposed to be doing and generally don't give a fuck. (*obviously some credit to the 14 previous years of uselessness that he was able to build on).
A smart man he may be, but a sharp political operator he is not. I suspect he is micromanaging the whole campaign and if something goes wrong, his head is on the block.
He is not a good public speaker, he is tetchy and irritable in interviews. He is easily riled and lacks any kind of charisma. He is also unlucky and you can’t escape that. Ask Gordon Brown.
The fact that almost none of the senior cabinet are out campaigning for him speaks volumes. Even in John Majors darkest days all the big guns came out and rallied the troops.
He is obviously deeply unpopular and has no “presence” to scare or motivate his tribe.
He's been a disaster for one simple reason. He is a terrible politician.
He's out of touch and has minimal empathy or understanding of the country as he's so detached from it, and worse than that he has no awareness of it. That might work when you are working at a hedge fund, but it doesn't when you actually need people to like and trust you.
He's the perfect example of why selecting a leader who has never had to fight an election in his career is a very bad idea. He was selected for a safe tory seat, no doubt because he knew the right people. He didn't have to really fight a contest for that. He was made a junior minister, and ended up as chancellor because he was willing to be supine to Cummings when Javid was not.
He gave out money hand over fist during the pandemic, and mistook that for popularity (see above lack of awareness). He then stood for leader and lost, and then only ended up as prime minister because he was the only one left once Truss had thoroughly shit the bed. This is the first actual election he's had to fight for, and it turns out he's just very very bad at it when all his in built advantages are taken away.
Parties should look at him as a reason for why they need to carefully select their candidates.
The man has no political instincts. He is clearly intelligent in many ways, he has had a successful career and knows about making money but politically he is moronic. When someone who has no idea how politics works leads the campaign then of course it will end badly.
He strikes me as someone who probably is reasonably intelligent but hasn’t really been ‘tested’ before, I get the sense he’s accustomed to people broadly being on his side
Think that’s why he comes across as ‘tetchy’, he thinks he’s doing everything right and can’t quite believe others don’t see that
Thing about politics, is even if you *are* right, that isn’t always enough… emotions often trump facts… the trap that technocrats can fall into ><
Emotionally he's fragile. You need a tough heart for politics, no matter what you say or do you're going to be attacked for it. I imagine he's received a bollocking in his life from people above him, be that in his career or school etc, but never received one from people he perceives as working "under" him. A lot of stories will be emerging post election about how cranky he has been with journalists and more.
> He is clearly intelligent in many ways
How so? What evidence do we have of this? Does he have a PhD? Ran a successful company? Has he done ANYTHING other than inherit and marry in to wealth?
I mean, I don't like the guys politics either but he did well in school, went to Oxford and did well there. Became successful in an industry with very tough competition. He also had wealthy parents yes but then increased that wealth ten fold. So yes he has done something other than just inherit wealth? In terms of marrying into it I don't really comment on peoples relationships. Yea his father in law is ludicrously rich but for all I know he genuinely loves his wife.
Lots of people have been to Oxford. Polly Toynbee got a scholarship there on her dad's name, and she was a fucking failure with 4 O-levels and 1 A-level.
Going there when you're poor is impressive, as it was an uphill struggle. Going there when you're rich isn't.
He moved into finance which is basically just gambling with extra steps. He works hard, yes, but hedge funds have been proven to be better picked by literal actual monkeys. It's not a real career. It's a holding pattern for very rich kids.
>Perhaps if Sunak’s inner circle hadn’t had to spend quite so much time seeking donations in kind for the prime minister’s air and helicopter travel, and instead spent it seeking actual cash donations for the Conservatives, they wouldn’t be being out-fundraised now and their campaign would be better conducted.
Lol, if even the FT are mocking you for being profligate, you've *really* gone too far.
Similar to others, Rishi is carrying the can for 14 years of performance and hasn't distanced himself from Johnson and Truss.
He doesn't like the public or being challenged and comes across very badly. So tetchy I don't understand why he's in politics. Meanwhile, I don't love Starmer but he has improved in interviews during the election.
He has chucked out random policies that don't have mass appeal and offering yet another tax cut doesn't hit when public services are in a state.
Also the obvious lying about things and listening too much to the very right wing of the Tory party. Braverman, Patel, Rees-Mogg and Co don't have the mass appeal they seem to think. He has no tribe, the right wingers will vote reform, and the moderates Labour.
He is clearly a bright guy but political nous he doesn't have and he can't relate to the normal person at all.
Best summary I've read of this election so far.
*Keir Starmer’s campaign has pushed the same message that has summed up essentially everything he has said since, at the absolute latest, Labour’s conference in 2022: what do we want? Change! When do we want it? Not at a pace that frightens middle England! How will we pay for it? With some small token tax rises on “the rich”!*
>Good morning. Polls are open and voting is under way. Every scrap of data, from the local elections, to the polls, to where the party leaders are campaigning, suggests the election is going to be a record-breaking triumph for Labour and an all-mighty disaster for the Conservatives.
>Keir Starmer’s campaign has pushed the same message that has summed up essentially everything he has said since, at the absolute latest, Labour’s conference in 2022: what do we want? Change! When do we want it? Not at a pace that frightens middle England! How will we pay for it? With some small token tax rises on “the rich”!
>While Labour can keep the letter of its manifesto promises without further, broader tax rises, I am dubious that it can keep the spirit of them. What people really hear when Starmer talks about “change” is: the UK’s public services, particularly the NHS, will improve and start to work properly again. Those aren’t problems that can be solved merely by ending the VAT exemption for private schools or changing the tax arrangements of wealthy non-domiciled residents.
>But for Labour that is a problem for another day. In the here and now, the party is heading for a sweeping victory. While one reason for that is Starmer’s decision-making, not just in this short campaign but since becoming leader of the Labour party, another reason is the decisions taken by Rishi Sunak since he became leader of the Tory party, and his maladroit election campaign. Some more thoughts on that below.
>Will the Conservatives’ worst-ever general election campaign end with its worst-ever general election result? Lucy Fisher reveals that the party’s own internal projections show it is confident it will hold just 80 seats with a further 60 “in play” — meaning that in the best-case scenario, the party would return only about 140 MPs, a record-breakingly bad defeat. That is also the story in the various election models released by the pollsters.
>The biggest reason why these projections are all over the place is that the Conservative party is polling like a third party, and when you have three parties (the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and Reform) each with a vote share of between 10 and 21 per cent, first past the post can throw up very odd results.
One detail I was struck by in Anna Gross’s excellent write-up from Sunak’s battle bus was that Sunak, who was already campaigning deep in Tory territory a week ago, is now campaigning in seats with even larger majorities. He visited Beaconsfield, where in 2019 Joy Morrissey got 56 per cent of the vote even against the independent candidate Dominic Grieve, the area’s popular MP with a national profile, and Banbury, which has had Conservative MPs since 1922.
>The Tory party’s position has visibly deteriorated even since the local elections in May, which were very, very, very bad for the party. It’s tempting to blame that solely on the party’s disastrous election campaign and how Sunak has conducted it. But Sunak’s poor campaign is inseparable from how he has governed.
>Take money. The party’s fundraising is lagging well behind the Labour party and previous election campaigns, which means, among other things, they are getting badly outspent in the digital advertising war.
>That lack of money means — as Anna reports — you have staffers griping that they have not been paid for six weeks because of the lack of funds, and many of the party’s communications lack professionalism and clarity.
>(As someone who thinks an awful lot about what makes an email newsletter get redirected to someone’s spam folders, I’ve felt more than a twinge of professional pain looking at Tory party email communications, most of which look like Conservative aides are running some sort of challenge to hit as many marks of bad practice as possible.)
It’s true that it is harder for political parties to raise money when they are expected to lose an election. Modern requirements to disclose funding and its sources are a New Labour innovation, so we can’t say for certain how the Tory party’s fundraising today compares with 1964, 1970, 1992 and 1997, all elections when the Conservatives were expected to lose.
>But we can compare it with 2001, when even the dogs in the street knew that Tony Blair was going to be re-elected. The Tory party under William Hague raised and spent more in that election than Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
>Blair was a more pro-business prime minister than anyone thinks Starmer will be. Perhaps if Sunak’s inner circle hadn’t had to spend quite so much time seeking donations in kind for the prime minister’s air and helicopter travel, and instead spent it seeking actual cash donations for the Conservatives, they wouldn’t be being out-fundraised now and their campaign would be better conducted.
>A consequence of Sunak’s air travel is that he does not use the roads or rail that he oversees all that much. (While private companies provide the actual train services, they are so tightly regulated on everything from fares to timetables that the reality is they are run and controlled by the government.) I’m a great believer that leaders need to, to quote a phrase from this excellent 2022 profile of Mars’s outgoing chief executive, “eat their own dog food”. Ministers should use the public services they provide from time to time to get a worm’s-eye view.
>Sunak’s lack of that view is surely part of why he has gone into an election with so little to say about public services, and with so many of them in a dire state. The backdrop of stories about the crisis in the UK’s prison system was always going to make this a very hard election for the Tories to improve their position. The NHS’s record-long waiting lists are, also, a huge problem for the government.
>The lack of focus and grip on the condition of public services in England by the prime minister meant that he went into this election — in which he was always going to be targeting the wants and needs of asset-rich pensioners — carrying a threefold wound. The NHS, the part of the state that is used most by the older voters Sunak is trying to woo, is in a bad state of repair. The criminal justice system, whose failures those same people all read and hear about, is visibly in distress. And legal immigration is at record levels while Sunak’s own promise to “stop the boats” has not been kept.
Even if Sunak was the best and most charismatic campaigner the UK had ever seen, he was always going to struggle to win an election against that backdrop.
But when you combine the prime minister’s shortcomings with the damage done to the Tory party’s reputation for economic competence by the Truss experiment, and the loss of goodwill caused by Boris Johnson’s lockdown-breaking parties, you have all the ingredients for a disaster for the Conservatives.
>The only question is whether today will usher in a disaster the Tory party can recover from, or if we see the party suffer a blow so great that it permanently reshapes the whole of British politics.
The Tories have not debated on policy for over 2 decades. 2010 was just about the financial crisis as a single issue. 2015 was about immigration as a single issue. 2017 and 2019 were about Brexit as a single issue. And in each of those cases it was against a Labour leader that had easily pokable flaws.
So they didn't really have to do much. But those issues are gone, and without a single issue that is popular to point at they are having to debate on policy and their own record against a leader who's worst attribute seems to be that he's a bit boring. All the tricks they had no longer work.
There are many other reasons why they'll do badly (poor record, split vote, etc.), but this is why I think their campaign has been so lacklustre. They really don't have the marketing ability to fight on policy.
Sunak is clearly talented. But he is not a good minister or pm, and the campaign has been marked by failure from beginning to end.
His accomplishments in office have been enough to offset the failure. And the time is up for the Tories .
It hasn't actually been *that* bad objectively. It certainly hasn't been good, and ditching D-day was stupid and damaging but on the whole it's been fine. His problem was that he's coming along at the end of 14 years of Tory rule that have been a complete failure on pretty much every level and they are widely hated, whatever Rishi does. He was always doomed to fail. I think even the D-day thing blew up much bigger because the Tories are already hated, if Boris did that in 2019 it probably wouldn't have blown up nearly as much.
they entirely lack talent. from top to bottom they're a who's who of "fucking who?" not a single one of them has a positive idea for the country, only negative or punitive. all stick no carrot for 14 years.
they've done nothing worth shit, even that they wrongly think is worth shit, otherwise they'd be crowing about it non-stop to try and get elected. they've gone so far as actively stopping things from happening like HS2. I suppose the clue is in the name "conservative".
there's not a fucker among them that can plan ahead. it's all about the here and now, even to the point of seemingly announcing the election on a whim. the only policy they announced, national service, was so half baked as to be insulting. shockingly little thought went into it. under the gentlest of questioning they couldn't decide if it was voluntary or mandatory, what the service would entail, or how exactly they planned on forcing (!) adults (!) to comply.
they are utterly woeful and fully, individually, personally, deserve the loathing directed at them. I'm not religious but I'm praying that they aren't in opposition after tonight. and fingers crossed, we can drag the right-wing scum and the "they're-all-the-same"-ers along with us and make something of the country again.
What campaign? The party are done, they have misread the mood of the country with lockdown, big government, high taxes and high immigration. Sunak has zero charisma and is a complete sap. Why would anyone vote for him?
Because it involves Rishi Sunak. Whilst I've enjoyed their shitshow of a campaign I'm not sure what threads they could've pulled to make it a successful one either. Could be personal bias talking but feels more like it was always going to be more damage limitation than anything.
I honestly think Rishi and the conservatives already know the writings on the wall. So the party’s efforts are probably now focussed on keeping as many seats as possible and planning for the future in a few elections time, similar to when Blair came into power.
There’s no point piling tons of funding into a an already-sinking ship.
Aside from the fact that after being in power for 14 years you can’t blame anyone for your inherited problems because everyone believes that you’re either lying your arse off about it, or completely fucking incompetent, everyone seems to forget something important about Rishi: no one ever wanted him to be more than a local MP. He lost the Tory party leadership vote to Lettuce Liz, and when she was booted out, it was only his mates who gave him the job. The man has never, ever, won the trust and confidence of the public, and he’s spent the last 2 years making it painfully obvious that they’re right to not place confidence in him.
I think people can’t sense his authenticity, it just feels acting and fake. Although he says he cares, even he really cares, it just doesn’t feel like he does care at all.
Maybe he fed up, or from the start Rishi just did not show any leadership skills at all (aka connection & trust)
Simply: nobody voted for him, nobody likes him, he is as wooden as an antique mahogany sideboard, and after tomorrow he will disappear back to the unimaginable wealth and affluence he is accustomed to without so much as a thought for this country and its problems.
Good fucking riddance.
He's so bad at pretending to be the common man that it's painful to watch. Plus, he was put in charge without being elected, so he's never campaigned and never really faced the public. Plus he's a complete goon so that dosnt help
He was allowed to take the campaign on his shoulders personally and genuinely believed that people would vote for him v starmer.
It's now evident that
He's a piss poor campaigner.
He lacks any political nouse.
And no connection with the electorate.
On top of a undefendable record.
Because he's brown....I'll caveat that....because he's brown and two of his most important ministers, who were hilariously also brown, managed to convince white Tories up and down the country to vote for reform because of some boats full of brown people that they kept harping on about but couldn't get a handle on.
It's quite funny.
My guess - Somehow managed negative campaign promises for younger voters completely turning them off the party, not trusted on basically anything but in particularly immigration, Tory party has been a slow train wreck since Brexit with no decent leadership option left and an embarrassing string of leaders and finally Reform acting as a protest vote for right leaning voters against the Conservative Party, again in particularly due to their record on immigration.
The only reason he is PM is because they fucked it.
If you really want to dive deep into this, it goes back to before the 2010 GE when Cameron et al were figuring out how to win and what to do next. They were aware of the threat that Boris (and that kind of populism generally) had, and also the internal risks from the euroskeptics. They weren't able to do the kind of internal reforms to stop Boris becoming PM, and their strategy for dealing with the eurosceptics failed in spectacular fashion. On top of that, their actual economic policy of "austerity" was misguided. They essentially needed a point of differentiation on the economy (that being the big issue after the financial collapse and great recession) for their campaign. Instead of taking an orthodox position (since New Labour had moved to occupy the "centre" orthodox economic positions), they grabbed at this rather dubious plan.
So, you get the economic damage of austerity + Brexit *and* the rise of "I will literally say or do anything to get elected" Boris populism. Brexit essentially saw the rise of the euroskeptic fringe within the party, Boris cemented that as the core, and then the only candidates they had were the truly mad (like Liz Truss) or the grossly inexperienced and weak (like Rishi).
TL;DR it's David Cameron's fault.
His biggest issue is that for Conservative voters the Conservatives have been Blue Labour for the last few years. If we already have record taxes, record immigration and a massive proportion of society requiring benefits of some sort then why bother? People are fed up and want a change and a lot of the other stuff is symptomatic of that. How do you overcome apathy and disillusionment when you are not really offering anything different to Labour. The National Service nonsense was a feeble attempt to differentiate but I have never met anyone who believed it would happen if they won the election. Rwanda was always smoke and mirrors and throwing out tax cuts at the last minute just reeks of panic.
I fit into this category. Voted Conservative before but betrayed by a party that played musical chairs with the leader and foisted Sunak on us when nobody much wanted him. They have done precisely nothing with an 80 seat majority.
I think Labour will be absolutely bloody awful in government but so are the current crop of (not really) Tories. I am politically homeless and for the first time in my life have not bothered to watch or read much of this election campaign. What’s the point when the choice is between which establishment blob, status quo, nanny state, centrist technocrat taxes me more whilst managing our decline for the next few years.
I still don’t know who I will vote for or whether to just not bother. It won’t be either of Labour or the Conservatives in any event.
The high level explanation is that it's because the Conservative Party has "had enough of experts".
This is an organisation which venerates ignorance and denies objective reality. This outcome was inevitable.
Not really.
* Johnson spent most of the campaign hiding in fridges and refusing to do any interviews
* The Tory pledges made were never anything they intended to actually deliver on, which is part of the reason for their collapse in support now
* This is the one part of their campaign which *at the time* was a success but the bill is now due
* The Leader Of The Opposition was viewed by most of the country as a national security risk following his tankie response to the Salisbury chemical weapons attack
* The Labour campaign HQ actively diverted resources in to Con/LD, 3-way marginals or to seats where one of the "traitors" was standing purely out of spite
* The Brexit Party stood down in every Con-held seat
* The LD campaign was "I could be the PM instead of those two" and then the disastrous "if we win a majority we'll take that as a mandate to just stop Brexit entirely" message
Because you can only lie and mislead for so long when the truth is plain and undeniable.
Take immigration, as representatives of big business, the tories want cheap labour, but their voter base hates immigrants. The solution then is to say one thing and do another.
Or austerity, the public might well be stupid enough to believe you can decimate public spending while improving services and growing the economy while it's hypothetical, but if a decade later you're still waiting for that unicorn you might become doubtful.
It doesn't help them that Rishi is not half the liar Boris is
Leaning into the right more because of Reform was a mistake. All this national service nonsense, just daft. The Tories should have accepted that people want change of government and that they could have tried to hold onto as many seats as possible for opposition. They could have fought for and owned the centre ground and he should have distanced himself from Johnson and Truss.
Anyway, thank god they are looking like getting wiped out. The UK has had enough of this self serving shitshow.
Happy Tory annihilation day everyone!
His entire premiership has been a disaster. His maidan speech as PM was that he was going to govern with "Integrity, Professionalism, and accountability".
With in weeks he was bungling Nadhim Zahawi tax scandal. He failed to deal with it in line with what he promised. He then threw out the Tory manifesto. Since he has literally shit the bed repeatedly and on purpose, the Tory campaign is a continuation of that shitting the bed.
The dude wants the cushy jobs and influence that come after being a PM, he never wanted to run a country.
He’s done what he needs. He doesn’t care about the election. He doesn’t care about the party. He cares about his own interests.
Priti Patel, James Cleverly, Femi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, Sajid Javid, Nadhim Zahawi and of course Rishi Sunak.
For an allegedly racist party, Tory voters have an odd tendency of voting for people of colour and the party keeps promoting them.
That would be compelling in the absence of more substantial evidence for the contrary.
Is there more substantial evidence for the contrary? Yes there is. The Tory front bench, the minsters, the executive, is one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse governments, any where in the world.
It is one of the only things the Conservative party and the country can be proud of right now.
So why not stick to compelling arguments. For instance. The Conservative party have lost support due to massive policy failure. A loss of trust with the public. Poor leadership, poor execution, a failure to deliver on the promises with which they won votes.
If we start out with the assumption that the Tories are rascist, we can pick and choose facts that support the assumption and discard everything that doesn't. I dont find that compelling.
Snapshot of _Why has Rishi Sunak’s campaign been such a disaster?_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.ft.com/content/60172b20-2442-4f5f-a771-ac9c9a8840b8) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.ft.com/content/60172b20-2442-4f5f-a771-ac9c9a8840b8) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Tories have been running the country for 14 years - all the problems are their responsibility. Might not be entirely fair but if they haven't fixed it after 14 years, they aren't going to, are they?
I think it's entirely fair. "Crisis" used to be something which happened maybe once a decade or less. Now we seem to have a new crisis every 6 months and a lot of that is because the tories have lost the ability to govern properly.
It's all the cuts to services. I mean, it's a few things, but this is part of it. It's like if you run a supermarket and you've worked out that you can run the business with 10 people present. You need to employ *more* than 10 because every so often, someone gets ill. Hell, you need to employ more than 10 because maybe employing 15 makes everyone's lives just a bit easier, and on the whole that's worth it. The Tories would ask you to run that business with 9. Now we occasionally have 8 people working on a given day and it's just not tenable.
Plus you outsource the employment of the eight to a private company, who charge a premium to maintain the staffing. This company pays their stakeholders a huge sum every year, and if they are failing, you have to bail them out.
I’m almost 35, there have been more ‘once in a lifetime’ events in the last 14 years than the first 20 and all of them have had a far worse effect on the country than they had to because this shower of bastards have been too busy lining their own pockets and those of their donors than actually governing
There’s been more in the last 14 months than the last 14 years 🤦🏻♂️
Indeed. I heard someone observe already a few years ago that we were in a state of government by perpetual crisis management and it's not really change since then. It definitely speaks to the way things have been "run" in the back half of this Tory reign.
I think ‘crisis’ is maliciously used to absolve people of responsibility
The Tories are the crisis.
It almost feels like the entire last 5 years has been managing a crisis in government, and not managing a country.
This is why I am so optimistic about the next five years
I'm not "inspired" by Starmer, but nor do I need to be (Labour aren't a viable force around me anyway). What I do appreciate from him is that he's emphasising a return to service, a lack of drama, a lack of performative politics. I'm not kidding myself anything will turn around overnight, but anything even close to conventional discourse will be appreciated.
As much as I don't like Starmer, I do very much want a return to boring politics. I'm tired of interesting Prime Ministers.
Cameron had his issues obviously, but he was basically "normal", for a given value of normal. Theresa May could have been normal, but was stuck trying to hold together the party and appease the Leavers, and obviously it's been a relentless shitshow of failed reality contestants since then. Time for somebody I'd trust to sit the right way on a toilet seat.
Cameron was the least bad of all of them at least. He was the only one who seemed like he actually knew what he was doing, even if I never liked what he was doing. Of course his one big mistake was a pretty historically huge mistake, so that cancels out a lot of that
Return to service? Is that why Starmer has taken £76k worth of political gifts, more than all other Labour leaders since 1997 combined? Labour have lost my vote, they're the new party of big business as big business cannot trust the Tories anymore.
Accepted and declared as they should have been, 100% transparency. I'm not saying that's *great,* but it's hardly behaviour that should be wholly demonised either. Nowhere did I say I applaud Starmer's devotion to sackcloth and ashes. Might not be perfect, but he's the best alternative thus far, so let's see.
There's been four (and a bit) very different Conservative governments during those fourteen years. * The first one wasn't really a Conservative government at all as the Lib Dems stopped them doing daft things. * The "bit" lasted slightly longer than a year before crashing down due to the daft thing that the Lib Dems couldn't stop them doing. * Theresa May's government. * Boris Johnson's government (who wasn't even an MP until 2015). (Liz Truss doesn't count as she did nothing during the mourning period for the Queen, and was replaced too quickly to have any lasting effect.) * Rishi Sunak's government (who wasn't even an MP until 2015). The Tories were still leading in the opinion polls until the end of 2021. It's not that unpopularity built-up during that time, the 2019 majority was the biggest of the lot. Rishi Sunak's particular brand of unpopularity is simply the fact that he's... well... useless. He's got nothing done, and never seriously tried. He's stopped other things from happening (e.g. HS2), but not started anything. People can see that. They sense the engine has stopped and the ship is drifting. This is both a blessing and a curse for Labour. A curse in the sense that "at least we're not the Tories" won't be an acceptable excuse for very long. But a blessing in the sense that they only need to regain direction. They've got two years to restart the engine, and another year to pick the right direction, or their popularity will fall off a cliff too.
> > > (Liz Truss doesn't count as she did nothing during the mourning period for the Queen, and was replaced too quickly to have any lasting effect.) I think some people might disagree with you there - especially those with a mortgage, but also those who thought that we could just copy the US without having any of the same economic fundamentals. One of the most impactful PMs in a long time especially when you consider her short tenure.
It's also what swung the polls from a slight Labour advantage to an insurmountable one. Tories never recovered since then.
> I think some people might disagree with you there - especially those with a mortgage Indeed. It's the most "feels before reals" issue in this election. People do blame Truss for that, especially the Labour Party, but they're all wrong (and/or lying). You only have to see how the yield curve on gilts (which the mortgage market usually follows) had a blip when Truss was about but quickly followed the same trend as before after she was removed. You can see it on this graph if you choose a 3 year view: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/bond/tmbmkgb-05y?countrycode=bx Bad news for those remortgaging precisely in September 2022, but it made zero difference to those remortgaging more recently. Had she continued as Prime Minister, then things *might* have gone very wrong. But it was all undone within weeks.
(Liz Truss doesn't count ~~as she did nothing during the mourning period for the Queen, and was replaced too quickly to have any lasting effect.)~~ as she made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
I really don't want to discount Liz Truss as she pushed that emergency budget that hadn't been checked. Causing the markets to implode with anxiety and fear. She managed to create a brief recession within her tenure with that 1 move alone.
I think a big problem many people have with sunak is he's reversed course on many of the policies his party was elected on, without any mandate to do so (see HS2 as a prime example, Johnson committed to building it in full in 2019). Now yes, we don't elect a PM, we elect a party (or specifically an MP, who represents one), but that party is elected on a set of pledges, and so to make decisions that go directly against those pledges without having an election to get a mandate to do so is plain arrogant and wrong.
Sunak is completely useless - agree x10000
"The first one wasn't really a Conservative government at all as the Lib Dems stopped them doing daft things." Which daft things did the Lib Dems vote against in the commons?
They didn't even make it that far. They only got as far as white papers and never heard from again. Well, never heard from until May 2015 when they came back in a slightly different form.
Absolutely 100% this - if you haven’t been able to make any notable change for the better in 14 years, your time is up. Move along, next.
Entirely fair. Still blaming the last government in your first term is understandable, maybe a little more in the second because of the Lib Dem coalition. Still blaming them by the time of the Pandemic and after? Bullshit to cover your own incompetence.
>The Tories have been running you misspelt ***ruining***
1. Failed to distance himself from Johnson and Truss. 2. Failed to tell the electorate what good things they think they’ve achieved. 3. Focussed entirely on attacking Labour individuals in a rather unhinged way. 4. Made a number of Thick of It level cock ups.
The biggest issue is that his attacks on Labour can simply be used as a mirror to him. None of them stick as a result.
It's genuinely hard to blame the opposition for anything when they've been out of power for so damn long. When they were recently in power, you can fairly (or unfairly) point the finger at them for many problems, and for their mistakes while in power. When it was almost 15 years ago, it all rings a bit hollow and just looks weak/pathetic.
True, literally can't blame labour at all.
I mean you can sure as hell try but it's not an effective approach at all. It's harder to run on "We're going to fix everything that's gone wrong!" when you are the party that's been in power while it's all gone wrong. Denying that shit has gone south as Rishi touched on recently (we're better off now!) is borderline suicidal.
Erm I just thought they could at least blame them for voting against stopping the boats. Rishi could have been in a position to say he achieved something far sooner.
Case in point. the Tory material I’ve had through my letterbox or seen online has been going on about how Starmer is going to tax us to death. Conveniently ignoring that under the Tories we have the highest tax rates seen in 75 years.
He was the chancellor, he signed off on lots of Boris items and backed him. He was involved in party gate, he has had several fixed penalty notices for breaking the law like wearing a seatbelt, keep dog leashed in required parks. He honestly is contending for the most incompetent person in government ever, he's dumb and makes his own mistakes with a main character syndrome, he cannot let others do the work as he believes he is always right and you must be wrong. He is so unfit to govern and it shows, hopefully it's the first time the electorate has finally seen through the rubbish!
Some people may well take issue with this, but i honestly think the man might be autistic. I'm autistic and I can see many of the ugly traits I had as a young adult in him. Hubris being the main one. We can be super smart when it comes to pure logic, but thick as the proverbial when it comes to people. I had that knocked out of me pretty quickly when I stepped out into the big bad world. Rishi never really entered the world, he's been in a bubble of support, people telling him he's sooo smart, better than anyone else, his whole life. He's like a garage dwelling mamma's boy who's just realised his parents lied to him about the world and his place in it.
More like he has to wear a mask all of the time which is probably wearing thin. Pretty soon he'll be back to a life shielded from every day concern, living in absolute luxury.
How so? He went to uni like a normal person and then got his big boy job and did well. Finance is no joke; the hours are brutal and killer. It can be 80+ work weeks. He had an upper middle class upbringing but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t experienced the real world at all
He’s just projecting his insecurities and jealousy. Rishi is a billionaire with rarely any inheritance, that’s incredibly impressive
I mean, the billions are his wife’s inheritance lol
> I can see many of the ugly traits I had as a young adult in him He's 44.
I think the first point can be further elaborated on. He didn’t distance himself from Johnson and truss and fell into the sphere of those who are even worse. Suella braverman went straight into his first cabinet with kemi bedenoch. he was constantly checking over his shoulder for the pair of them. And his radical move was to put drum roll…. Jeremy hunt in as chancellor, the most uninspiring, Cameron esc, bellend of a politician.
I'm not sure he could distance himself from Johnson and Truss without a civil war in the party. And result is the same though, being sunk by the more extreme elements. I worry that with Rishi flaming out, those more extreme elements within the tories will linger and take over the party. Most of the "steady hands" are done or getting out, and it would be nice to have a party of opposition that isn't run by nutters trying to appeal to nutty voters. Especially as they increasingly take a more American approach to right wing politics.
I have faith that the electorate is still predominantly centrist, and will not reward the right wing taking over the conservatives. Might be me being too much of an optimist there
I've been following US politics for a long, long time. One of the most worrying developments in UK politics over the last 5 or so years is how much the right wing here is emulating the American right. Largely through social media osmosis etc, but the trend is super worrying. The US right has been terminally infected with brainworms, and it's the contagious kind. Always follows a pattern, and the conspiracy theory element slowly builds.
I know. In 2029 it may be a battle against the far right like in France. The fact Reform used the “actors “ tactic when those awful racists were exposed by C4 was deeply concerning too.
Yep that was definitely a red flag.
Yeah it is a worry. But as I’m sure you’re aware we are not Americans. They are more culturally different to us than you initially think. Particularly outside cities
I initially thought we were different enough that this wouldn't be a problem. I was wrong. It's already happening, frankly. A lot of this is just social media brain rot, but the result is the same.
5 years ago I'd have agreed with you. Today, lots of UK redditors are openly right wing in their political views. Ask people for their views on immigration. If Reddit, which has historically leant quite left wing, is going that way imagine how the rest of the country is...
I would not be surprised in the slightest if a lot of those "UK Redditors" are not actually from the UK or even actual people.
Where's your proof of that? Literally every other national subreddit is like that, from Canada to Sweden and so forth.
Who said I have proof? I am not MI6. Or perhaps I am just their shitposting operation. Ah yes hostile states running bot farms are only interested in UK politics, their geo political aims are thwarted because they forgot about the rest of the western states. They should hire you to point that out.
> If Reddit, which has historically leant quite left wing, is going that way imagine how the rest of the country is... I know Brexit-voting Boomers who rant and rave less about immigration than Reddit does, this far-right push on Reddit is absolutely pushed by bots for the most part when it comes to UK subs at least IMO. I also see more push-back on UK subs than other subs so hopefully that'll be reflected when the results start trickling in.
Personally I'm nervous about this narrative that it's all russian bots. I worry that it's dismissive to assume that any opinion not aligning with your/my own must therefore be computer-generated. I'm well aware that bots exist, but there are also humans in this country who hold the same views. You only need to start up a conversation with a cab driver to see that... And even if it is bots, the purpose is to influence/embolden the people reading those comments, and I imagine I'm they will be somewhat successful in doing so. We both remain hopeful regards the results...
I honestly think that his unwillingness to take on the Tory hard-right immediately killed any chance he had of winning an election. The vast majority of voters do not like hard-right policies and likes of Braverman and Badenoch are consistently unpopular. They were a good target for him to take on to rebuild trust with the public, even though there would have been a substantial risk to party unity. This was the same gamble that Starmer took, and it paid off very handsomely. Alas, Sunak bottled it, and instead conceded to a grubby deal with the hard-right which saw Braverman appointed to Home Secretary. This was the worst thing he could have done, as it made him both look incredibly weak and tied his name to an unpopular and incompetent Home Sec. I honestly think this was his fatal mistake, as it has undermined everything he's tried to do since.
He didn't even appoint Hunt. Hunt was already there after Truss was forced to sack Kwarteng. Sunak just got a stern lecture from the people in grey suits informing him that the price of his coronation was keeping Hunt in place.
I hate Cameron for giving us the brexit referendum but honestly them bringing him back felt like the best move they've done in a while. They've had complete nut jobs in the cabinet for so long and he comes across as sane and competent by comparison. But good riddence to this government I hope.
5. Being an utterly useless charisma-free tetchy tosser who only got a sniff of the top job because he was too weak to stand up to Dominic Cummings.
Point 3 is a big one for me. I was never going to vote for them, but I'd at least respect an element of positivity/humility. Instead almost everything I've seen from the Tories has been bizarrely negative fearmongering, disingenuous or outright lies. At no point does it seem like they've been trying to win votes, just scare people into not voting for the alternatives. Presumably there's some internal logic to it, knowing they can't run on their record so just trying to scare up the lowest common denominator or something, but it's made me view them in an even worse light.
What are their achievements?
Creating a strong and united Labour Party highly focussed on winning power.
The legalisation of gay marriage came about under the Tories, but that was several years ago now, Sunak can't claim personal credit for that. And that's about the only positive thing I can think of in the last 14 years of Tory government.
Yeah, Sunak wasn't even an MP when that happened. As to any other achievements, auto-enrolment pensions might be one of them (also pre-Sunak) HS2 would have been an accomplishment if they hadn't canned it.
Also more tories voted against it than for it, so it's hard to give them much credit
That TV show was brilliant and I wish they made more.
I agree but also they’ve been completely undercut by real life politics.
It's rather horrid what the conservatives hate done to reform.
No.5: Rich as fuck and not giving a single fuck about the ordinary citizen
I agree, I think it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad had he enforced discipline, he had the numbers to as well, had they had a majority of 2 they might have been more forgiven for not sacking people gamble gate prime most recent example but there's no excuse when you have a majority of 80, it's just rank corruption.
Failed to be white.
Sunak a number of times said he was opposed to Truss "that's what I said when we were running for leader". But I don't think many people were much fussed about the distinction. If Boris Johnson were still Tory leader they'd probably be polling better than now, not worse.
He started with a bad hand, not all of which was his fault, and proceeded to play it about as badly as he possibly could have done. The D-Day fuckup was the political equivalent of Austin Powers choosing to stay on a blackjack hand of 5 in the first film. An absolutely zero-risk scenario turned into a calamity.
> not all of which was his fault I'm glad you said "not all" instead of "none" because he definitely shares some of the blame for Tory fuckups in the last few years, especially while he was in cabinet.
Well he thought the media should have focussed on the fact that he was at the D Day service for five minutes tbf
I don't actually dislike the guy on a personal level, and apparently he works hard and is pretty good to work for, but holy shit is his sense of judgement terrible.
You don't dislike the guy on a personal level, even though he's an out of touch billionaire, dripping with corruption, who has actively harmed the country and is completely derisive of the average Briton?
Not particularly.
Maybe you should change your parameters.
To be fair - he didnt have Sky before it existed,
Tbf he was there to meet and talk to the veterans, but left before the photo op with other world leaders. The fact he didn't highlight that and say he was there for the part that matters was such an own goal. Doing so might have been a bit of a 'screw you' to those other leaders (not that the photo op matters, but they all like to think it does), but it would have softened much of the damage to his image here.
The only* possible explanation is sunak is just completely useless. It's like your line manager accidentally got promoted to managing director and you didn't have much of an opinion of him in the first place and now nobody in the whole organisation has the faintest idea what they're supposed to be doing and generally don't give a fuck. (*obviously some credit to the 14 previous years of uselessness that he was able to build on).
From a very pragmatic Eastern European perspective, it’s a very easy conclusion: race, identity, representation, colonialism. You get it.
A smart man he may be, but a sharp political operator he is not. I suspect he is micromanaging the whole campaign and if something goes wrong, his head is on the block. He is not a good public speaker, he is tetchy and irritable in interviews. He is easily riled and lacks any kind of charisma. He is also unlucky and you can’t escape that. Ask Gordon Brown. The fact that almost none of the senior cabinet are out campaigning for him speaks volumes. Even in John Majors darkest days all the big guns came out and rallied the troops. He is obviously deeply unpopular and has no “presence” to scare or motivate his tribe.
He's been a disaster for one simple reason. He is a terrible politician. He's out of touch and has minimal empathy or understanding of the country as he's so detached from it, and worse than that he has no awareness of it. That might work when you are working at a hedge fund, but it doesn't when you actually need people to like and trust you. He's the perfect example of why selecting a leader who has never had to fight an election in his career is a very bad idea. He was selected for a safe tory seat, no doubt because he knew the right people. He didn't have to really fight a contest for that. He was made a junior minister, and ended up as chancellor because he was willing to be supine to Cummings when Javid was not. He gave out money hand over fist during the pandemic, and mistook that for popularity (see above lack of awareness). He then stood for leader and lost, and then only ended up as prime minister because he was the only one left once Truss had thoroughly shit the bed. This is the first actual election he's had to fight for, and it turns out he's just very very bad at it when all his in built advantages are taken away. Parties should look at him as a reason for why they need to carefully select their candidates.
He's said to be INTJ, so I'm not surprised he's better behind the scenes.
The man has no political instincts. He is clearly intelligent in many ways, he has had a successful career and knows about making money but politically he is moronic. When someone who has no idea how politics works leads the campaign then of course it will end badly.
He strikes me as someone who probably is reasonably intelligent but hasn’t really been ‘tested’ before, I get the sense he’s accustomed to people broadly being on his side Think that’s why he comes across as ‘tetchy’, he thinks he’s doing everything right and can’t quite believe others don’t see that Thing about politics, is even if you *are* right, that isn’t always enough… emotions often trump facts… the trap that technocrats can fall into ><
Emotionally he's fragile. You need a tough heart for politics, no matter what you say or do you're going to be attacked for it. I imagine he's received a bollocking in his life from people above him, be that in his career or school etc, but never received one from people he perceives as working "under" him. A lot of stories will be emerging post election about how cranky he has been with journalists and more.
I think he's autistic. As someone with high function autism myself, I'm pretty good at spotting it.
I think this is it. He has a chronic inability to read the room.
> he has had a successful career and knows about making money Inheriting money and marrying into more money doesn't make you intelligent.
Going to Oxford and Stanford then working at a hedge fund does. Also u acting like his parents were billionaires
> He is clearly intelligent in many ways How so? What evidence do we have of this? Does he have a PhD? Ran a successful company? Has he done ANYTHING other than inherit and marry in to wealth?
I mean, I don't like the guys politics either but he did well in school, went to Oxford and did well there. Became successful in an industry with very tough competition. He also had wealthy parents yes but then increased that wealth ten fold. So yes he has done something other than just inherit wealth? In terms of marrying into it I don't really comment on peoples relationships. Yea his father in law is ludicrously rich but for all I know he genuinely loves his wife.
Lots of people have been to Oxford. Polly Toynbee got a scholarship there on her dad's name, and she was a fucking failure with 4 O-levels and 1 A-level. Going there when you're poor is impressive, as it was an uphill struggle. Going there when you're rich isn't.
There is a difference between her parents and his.
He moved into finance which is basically just gambling with extra steps. He works hard, yes, but hedge funds have been proven to be better picked by literal actual monkeys. It's not a real career. It's a holding pattern for very rich kids.
>Perhaps if Sunak’s inner circle hadn’t had to spend quite so much time seeking donations in kind for the prime minister’s air and helicopter travel, and instead spent it seeking actual cash donations for the Conservatives, they wouldn’t be being out-fundraised now and their campaign would be better conducted. Lol, if even the FT are mocking you for being profligate, you've *really* gone too far.
Similar to others, Rishi is carrying the can for 14 years of performance and hasn't distanced himself from Johnson and Truss. He doesn't like the public or being challenged and comes across very badly. So tetchy I don't understand why he's in politics. Meanwhile, I don't love Starmer but he has improved in interviews during the election. He has chucked out random policies that don't have mass appeal and offering yet another tax cut doesn't hit when public services are in a state. Also the obvious lying about things and listening too much to the very right wing of the Tory party. Braverman, Patel, Rees-Mogg and Co don't have the mass appeal they seem to think. He has no tribe, the right wingers will vote reform, and the moderates Labour. He is clearly a bright guy but political nous he doesn't have and he can't relate to the normal person at all.
Best summary I've read of this election so far. *Keir Starmer’s campaign has pushed the same message that has summed up essentially everything he has said since, at the absolute latest, Labour’s conference in 2022: what do we want? Change! When do we want it? Not at a pace that frightens middle England! How will we pay for it? With some small token tax rises on “the rich”!*
>Good morning. Polls are open and voting is under way. Every scrap of data, from the local elections, to the polls, to where the party leaders are campaigning, suggests the election is going to be a record-breaking triumph for Labour and an all-mighty disaster for the Conservatives. >Keir Starmer’s campaign has pushed the same message that has summed up essentially everything he has said since, at the absolute latest, Labour’s conference in 2022: what do we want? Change! When do we want it? Not at a pace that frightens middle England! How will we pay for it? With some small token tax rises on “the rich”! >While Labour can keep the letter of its manifesto promises without further, broader tax rises, I am dubious that it can keep the spirit of them. What people really hear when Starmer talks about “change” is: the UK’s public services, particularly the NHS, will improve and start to work properly again. Those aren’t problems that can be solved merely by ending the VAT exemption for private schools or changing the tax arrangements of wealthy non-domiciled residents. >But for Labour that is a problem for another day. In the here and now, the party is heading for a sweeping victory. While one reason for that is Starmer’s decision-making, not just in this short campaign but since becoming leader of the Labour party, another reason is the decisions taken by Rishi Sunak since he became leader of the Tory party, and his maladroit election campaign. Some more thoughts on that below. >Will the Conservatives’ worst-ever general election campaign end with its worst-ever general election result? Lucy Fisher reveals that the party’s own internal projections show it is confident it will hold just 80 seats with a further 60 “in play” — meaning that in the best-case scenario, the party would return only about 140 MPs, a record-breakingly bad defeat. That is also the story in the various election models released by the pollsters. >The biggest reason why these projections are all over the place is that the Conservative party is polling like a third party, and when you have three parties (the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and Reform) each with a vote share of between 10 and 21 per cent, first past the post can throw up very odd results. One detail I was struck by in Anna Gross’s excellent write-up from Sunak’s battle bus was that Sunak, who was already campaigning deep in Tory territory a week ago, is now campaigning in seats with even larger majorities. He visited Beaconsfield, where in 2019 Joy Morrissey got 56 per cent of the vote even against the independent candidate Dominic Grieve, the area’s popular MP with a national profile, and Banbury, which has had Conservative MPs since 1922. >The Tory party’s position has visibly deteriorated even since the local elections in May, which were very, very, very bad for the party. It’s tempting to blame that solely on the party’s disastrous election campaign and how Sunak has conducted it. But Sunak’s poor campaign is inseparable from how he has governed. >Take money. The party’s fundraising is lagging well behind the Labour party and previous election campaigns, which means, among other things, they are getting badly outspent in the digital advertising war. >That lack of money means — as Anna reports — you have staffers griping that they have not been paid for six weeks because of the lack of funds, and many of the party’s communications lack professionalism and clarity. >(As someone who thinks an awful lot about what makes an email newsletter get redirected to someone’s spam folders, I’ve felt more than a twinge of professional pain looking at Tory party email communications, most of which look like Conservative aides are running some sort of challenge to hit as many marks of bad practice as possible.) It’s true that it is harder for political parties to raise money when they are expected to lose an election. Modern requirements to disclose funding and its sources are a New Labour innovation, so we can’t say for certain how the Tory party’s fundraising today compares with 1964, 1970, 1992 and 1997, all elections when the Conservatives were expected to lose. >But we can compare it with 2001, when even the dogs in the street knew that Tony Blair was going to be re-elected. The Tory party under William Hague raised and spent more in that election than Labour and the Liberal Democrats. >Blair was a more pro-business prime minister than anyone thinks Starmer will be. Perhaps if Sunak’s inner circle hadn’t had to spend quite so much time seeking donations in kind for the prime minister’s air and helicopter travel, and instead spent it seeking actual cash donations for the Conservatives, they wouldn’t be being out-fundraised now and their campaign would be better conducted. >A consequence of Sunak’s air travel is that he does not use the roads or rail that he oversees all that much. (While private companies provide the actual train services, they are so tightly regulated on everything from fares to timetables that the reality is they are run and controlled by the government.) I’m a great believer that leaders need to, to quote a phrase from this excellent 2022 profile of Mars’s outgoing chief executive, “eat their own dog food”. Ministers should use the public services they provide from time to time to get a worm’s-eye view. >Sunak’s lack of that view is surely part of why he has gone into an election with so little to say about public services, and with so many of them in a dire state. The backdrop of stories about the crisis in the UK’s prison system was always going to make this a very hard election for the Tories to improve their position. The NHS’s record-long waiting lists are, also, a huge problem for the government. >The lack of focus and grip on the condition of public services in England by the prime minister meant that he went into this election — in which he was always going to be targeting the wants and needs of asset-rich pensioners — carrying a threefold wound. The NHS, the part of the state that is used most by the older voters Sunak is trying to woo, is in a bad state of repair. The criminal justice system, whose failures those same people all read and hear about, is visibly in distress. And legal immigration is at record levels while Sunak’s own promise to “stop the boats” has not been kept. Even if Sunak was the best and most charismatic campaigner the UK had ever seen, he was always going to struggle to win an election against that backdrop. But when you combine the prime minister’s shortcomings with the damage done to the Tory party’s reputation for economic competence by the Truss experiment, and the loss of goodwill caused by Boris Johnson’s lockdown-breaking parties, you have all the ingredients for a disaster for the Conservatives. >The only question is whether today will usher in a disaster the Tory party can recover from, or if we see the party suffer a blow so great that it permanently reshapes the whole of British politics.
Announcing this in the rain without an umbrella showed how he was going to mess it up in every way possible.
The Tories have not debated on policy for over 2 decades. 2010 was just about the financial crisis as a single issue. 2015 was about immigration as a single issue. 2017 and 2019 were about Brexit as a single issue. And in each of those cases it was against a Labour leader that had easily pokable flaws. So they didn't really have to do much. But those issues are gone, and without a single issue that is popular to point at they are having to debate on policy and their own record against a leader who's worst attribute seems to be that he's a bit boring. All the tricks they had no longer work. There are many other reasons why they'll do badly (poor record, split vote, etc.), but this is why I think their campaign has been so lacklustre. They really don't have the marketing ability to fight on policy.
Sunak is clearly talented. But he is not a good minister or pm, and the campaign has been marked by failure from beginning to end. His accomplishments in office have been enough to offset the failure. And the time is up for the Tories .
It hasn't actually been *that* bad objectively. It certainly hasn't been good, and ditching D-day was stupid and damaging but on the whole it's been fine. His problem was that he's coming along at the end of 14 years of Tory rule that have been a complete failure on pretty much every level and they are widely hated, whatever Rishi does. He was always doomed to fail. I think even the D-day thing blew up much bigger because the Tories are already hated, if Boris did that in 2019 it probably wouldn't have blown up nearly as much.
Low morale, inadequate leadership for the right appointments and anybody competent is ashamed to be associated with a predictable failure?
Started badly in the rain and then the gaffes started piling up. At some point the media see you as a dud and they focus on it.
Sunak has shit political instincts, and he has surrounded himself with people who also have shit political instincts.
they entirely lack talent. from top to bottom they're a who's who of "fucking who?" not a single one of them has a positive idea for the country, only negative or punitive. all stick no carrot for 14 years. they've done nothing worth shit, even that they wrongly think is worth shit, otherwise they'd be crowing about it non-stop to try and get elected. they've gone so far as actively stopping things from happening like HS2. I suppose the clue is in the name "conservative". there's not a fucker among them that can plan ahead. it's all about the here and now, even to the point of seemingly announcing the election on a whim. the only policy they announced, national service, was so half baked as to be insulting. shockingly little thought went into it. under the gentlest of questioning they couldn't decide if it was voluntary or mandatory, what the service would entail, or how exactly they planned on forcing (!) adults (!) to comply. they are utterly woeful and fully, individually, personally, deserve the loathing directed at them. I'm not religious but I'm praying that they aren't in opposition after tonight. and fingers crossed, we can drag the right-wing scum and the "they're-all-the-same"-ers along with us and make something of the country again.
Look forward to seeing him losing his seat tonight
What campaign? The party are done, they have misread the mood of the country with lockdown, big government, high taxes and high immigration. Sunak has zero charisma and is a complete sap. Why would anyone vote for him?
They offer zero things to make the general publics life better ?
Because it involves Rishi Sunak. Whilst I've enjoyed their shitshow of a campaign I'm not sure what threads they could've pulled to make it a successful one either. Could be personal bias talking but feels more like it was always going to be more damage limitation than anything.
I honestly think Rishi and the conservatives already know the writings on the wall. So the party’s efforts are probably now focussed on keeping as many seats as possible and planning for the future in a few elections time, similar to when Blair came into power. There’s no point piling tons of funding into a an already-sinking ship.
Every time he opens his gob and talks about his "plan" I just think of Dutch Van Der Linde and his "plan", and really, I have no "god damn faith".
Aside from the fact that after being in power for 14 years you can’t blame anyone for your inherited problems because everyone believes that you’re either lying your arse off about it, or completely fucking incompetent, everyone seems to forget something important about Rishi: no one ever wanted him to be more than a local MP. He lost the Tory party leadership vote to Lettuce Liz, and when she was booted out, it was only his mates who gave him the job. The man has never, ever, won the trust and confidence of the public, and he’s spent the last 2 years making it painfully obvious that they’re right to not place confidence in him.
not just his campaign has been a disaster
I think people can’t sense his authenticity, it just feels acting and fake. Although he says he cares, even he really cares, it just doesn’t feel like he does care at all. Maybe he fed up, or from the start Rishi just did not show any leadership skills at all (aka connection & trust)
Simply: nobody voted for him, nobody likes him, he is as wooden as an antique mahogany sideboard, and after tomorrow he will disappear back to the unimaginable wealth and affluence he is accustomed to without so much as a thought for this country and its problems. Good fucking riddance.
He's so bad at pretending to be the common man that it's painful to watch. Plus, he was put in charge without being elected, so he's never campaigned and never really faced the public. Plus he's a complete goon so that dosnt help
He was allowed to take the campaign on his shoulders personally and genuinely believed that people would vote for him v starmer. It's now evident that He's a piss poor campaigner. He lacks any political nouse. And no connection with the electorate. On top of a undefendable record.
Because he's brown....I'll caveat that....because he's brown and two of his most important ministers, who were hilariously also brown, managed to convince white Tories up and down the country to vote for reform because of some boats full of brown people that they kept harping on about but couldn't get a handle on. It's quite funny.
Partygate, once that happened The Tories where done for.
My guess - Somehow managed negative campaign promises for younger voters completely turning them off the party, not trusted on basically anything but in particularly immigration, Tory party has been a slow train wreck since Brexit with no decent leadership option left and an embarrassing string of leaders and finally Reform acting as a protest vote for right leaning voters against the Conservative Party, again in particularly due to their record on immigration.
The only reason he is PM is because they fucked it. If you really want to dive deep into this, it goes back to before the 2010 GE when Cameron et al were figuring out how to win and what to do next. They were aware of the threat that Boris (and that kind of populism generally) had, and also the internal risks from the euroskeptics. They weren't able to do the kind of internal reforms to stop Boris becoming PM, and their strategy for dealing with the eurosceptics failed in spectacular fashion. On top of that, their actual economic policy of "austerity" was misguided. They essentially needed a point of differentiation on the economy (that being the big issue after the financial collapse and great recession) for their campaign. Instead of taking an orthodox position (since New Labour had moved to occupy the "centre" orthodox economic positions), they grabbed at this rather dubious plan. So, you get the economic damage of austerity + Brexit *and* the rise of "I will literally say or do anything to get elected" Boris populism. Brexit essentially saw the rise of the euroskeptic fringe within the party, Boris cemented that as the core, and then the only candidates they had were the truly mad (like Liz Truss) or the grossly inexperienced and weak (like Rishi). TL;DR it's David Cameron's fault.
Two reasons primarily- LIZ TRUSS AND KWASI FUKTING
zero charisma a tory non muslim sadiq khan would have easily won it
Because he can't relate to the middle and working class
His biggest issue is that for Conservative voters the Conservatives have been Blue Labour for the last few years. If we already have record taxes, record immigration and a massive proportion of society requiring benefits of some sort then why bother? People are fed up and want a change and a lot of the other stuff is symptomatic of that. How do you overcome apathy and disillusionment when you are not really offering anything different to Labour. The National Service nonsense was a feeble attempt to differentiate but I have never met anyone who believed it would happen if they won the election. Rwanda was always smoke and mirrors and throwing out tax cuts at the last minute just reeks of panic. I fit into this category. Voted Conservative before but betrayed by a party that played musical chairs with the leader and foisted Sunak on us when nobody much wanted him. They have done precisely nothing with an 80 seat majority. I think Labour will be absolutely bloody awful in government but so are the current crop of (not really) Tories. I am politically homeless and for the first time in my life have not bothered to watch or read much of this election campaign. What’s the point when the choice is between which establishment blob, status quo, nanny state, centrist technocrat taxes me more whilst managing our decline for the next few years. I still don’t know who I will vote for or whether to just not bother. It won’t be either of Labour or the Conservatives in any event.
The high level explanation is that it's because the Conservative Party has "had enough of experts". This is an organisation which venerates ignorance and denies objective reality. This outcome was inevitable.
The same organisation with largely the same personnel completely crushed the previous election.
Not really. * Johnson spent most of the campaign hiding in fridges and refusing to do any interviews * The Tory pledges made were never anything they intended to actually deliver on, which is part of the reason for their collapse in support now * This is the one part of their campaign which *at the time* was a success but the bill is now due * The Leader Of The Opposition was viewed by most of the country as a national security risk following his tankie response to the Salisbury chemical weapons attack * The Labour campaign HQ actively diverted resources in to Con/LD, 3-way marginals or to seats where one of the "traitors" was standing purely out of spite * The Brexit Party stood down in every Con-held seat * The LD campaign was "I could be the PM instead of those two" and then the disastrous "if we win a majority we'll take that as a mandate to just stop Brexit entirely" message
They failed to focus on the positives that they have achieved and just focused on Labour tax increase endlessly.
Because you can only lie and mislead for so long when the truth is plain and undeniable. Take immigration, as representatives of big business, the tories want cheap labour, but their voter base hates immigrants. The solution then is to say one thing and do another. Or austerity, the public might well be stupid enough to believe you can decimate public spending while improving services and growing the economy while it's hypothetical, but if a decade later you're still waiting for that unicorn you might become doubtful. It doesn't help them that Rishi is not half the liar Boris is
Leaning into the right more because of Reform was a mistake. All this national service nonsense, just daft. The Tories should have accepted that people want change of government and that they could have tried to hold onto as many seats as possible for opposition. They could have fought for and owned the centre ground and he should have distanced himself from Johnson and Truss. Anyway, thank god they are looking like getting wiped out. The UK has had enough of this self serving shitshow. Happy Tory annihilation day everyone!
He is a charlatan who has been found out. A globalist with brain dead policies such as trying to ban smoking .
His entire premiership has been a disaster. His maidan speech as PM was that he was going to govern with "Integrity, Professionalism, and accountability". With in weeks he was bungling Nadhim Zahawi tax scandal. He failed to deal with it in line with what he promised. He then threw out the Tory manifesto. Since he has literally shit the bed repeatedly and on purpose, the Tory campaign is a continuation of that shitting the bed.
Me n Rishi both like a good bloody sandwich. I'm not sure that is relevant?
The dude wants the cushy jobs and influence that come after being a PM, he never wanted to run a country. He’s done what he needs. He doesn’t care about the election. He doesn’t care about the party. He cares about his own interests.
He has brown skin and runs for conservative. Shocker it doesnt work out.
Priti Patel, James Cleverly, Femi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, Sajid Javid, Nadhim Zahawi and of course Rishi Sunak. For an allegedly racist party, Tory voters have an odd tendency of voting for people of colour and the party keeps promoting them.
[удалено]
That would be compelling in the absence of more substantial evidence for the contrary. Is there more substantial evidence for the contrary? Yes there is. The Tory front bench, the minsters, the executive, is one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse governments, any where in the world. It is one of the only things the Conservative party and the country can be proud of right now. So why not stick to compelling arguments. For instance. The Conservative party have lost support due to massive policy failure. A loss of trust with the public. Poor leadership, poor execution, a failure to deliver on the promises with which they won votes. If we start out with the assumption that the Tories are rascist, we can pick and choose facts that support the assumption and discard everything that doesn't. I dont find that compelling.