Inside Sunak’s disastrous gamble to call the election early

In an extract from his new book, The Telegraph’s political editor reveals how the former PM defied his campaign manager and paid the price

Was the Conservative election defeat unavoidable? It is tricky to construct a campaign scenario which would have kept the Tories in power without having to rely on implausible developments in the race.
The party was asking for a historic fifth term, stretching their rule to 19 years, when the political mood of the country tends to change on a shorter cycle. The baggage of a double prime minister switch in 2022, including a calamitous mini-Budget from Liz Truss that exploded Tory trust on the economy, was there long before election decisions were made. The result suggests a sea-change in voter sentiments not easily countered.
Yet nothing is fated. The exact shape of how the votes landed – in particular how low the Tory seat count dropped, leaving the party only just able to pull together a meaningful opposition – was not inevitable. Decisions carry consequences. And for those left spitting blood at the Tory battering, Team Sunak is to blame for one original sin: calling the election early.
The general election was scheduled for July 2024. It did not have to be held until January 2025. It was Rishi Sunak who chose the date. He and his team decided to forgo six months of Conservative government to gamble on a summer election. They lost. It is a call sure to be long debated inside the party and beyond. And so it is worth laying out the thinking in all its nuances – as told by those directly involved, including 25 insiders from across the main political parties. 
Sometimes momentous political decisions can be pinpointed to a single moment. Not so for this one, according to members of Sunak’s inner circle. Instead, there was a rolling, morphing discussion, some options were closed down swiftly, others moved from possible to probable before eventually one date – July 4 – was locked in as a certainty.
The backdrop was mounting frustration with the consistency of Labour’s lead in the opinion polls. Throughout 2023, Sunak made progress on some of his “five priorities”, with inflation falling and the number of migrants arriving on small-boat crossings down from 2022. Yet early tightening in the polls to spring had hit the buffers when Boris Johnson’s partygate saga made headlines again with the parliamentary investigation that would force his resignation. Come the autumn there had been a net zero reset and a party conference speech that saw the prime minister try to embody change, railing against the “30-year political status quo” – a repositioning soon abandoned when he made David Cameron, a predecessor, his foreign secretary. By the start of 2024, Labour was sitting on a poll lead of about 20 percentage points, landslide victory territory. Sunak declared his “working assumption” was to hold the election “in the second half of this year”, a line he would stick to whenever asked. 
But, as a senior Tory campaign figure admitted, the position was “entirely media management” – something to say to endless “When’s the date?” reporter questions. In private, the deciding team was much more open to going early and catching their opponents off guard.
Two gatherings on Sunday nights in Number 10 were key. The location was on the building’s first floor, the cast list short. It included: Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, whose instincts Sunak had, over the years, come to rely on; Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak’s chief of staff, who had been with him since his Treasury days; James Forsyth, the school friend, who made Sunak his best man and had deep Tory connections as The Spectator’s former political editor; and Isaac Levido, the Australian strategist, who led the party’s winning 2019 campaign and had the same role this time round. 
Others would shape thinking throughout this period, too: Nerissa Chesterfield, Sunak’s director of communications; Rupert Yorke, his deputy chief of staff, focusing on political matters; Simon Hart, the chief whip; and, of course, Akshata, the prime minister’s wife.
The first Sunday night gathering was on 10 March 10. The subject at hand: whether or not to call the general election for May 2, when the country would already be voting in the local elections.
Stumbling blocks soon emerged. The economic recovery was always a central plank in the Tory campaign but the country was then, technically, still in a recession. Plus, turning local elections into a general, driving up turnout and making voters think nationally, hurt the chances of Tory mayors Andy Street in the West Midlands and Ben Houchen in Tees Valley using their strong local brands to win re-election. A quick consensus was reached that May would not work.
Hence the second Sunday gathering, on April 28. The question now was whether to call a summer election or wait until the autumn – October or November, as was widely expected in the Westminster bubble. It was here that the path was set for a summer election.
The final lock-in came after the local elections, when Houchen’s victory offered a glimmer of hope and forecasts pointed to inflation dropping back down to the 2 per cent target set by the Bank of England, allowing the prime minister to declare an economic victory of sorts.
But why? Why forgo the possibility of things improving by firing the starting gun, especially when the Tories were 20 points behind in the polls? Sunak’s inner circle put forward three broad reasons.
Firstly, there were plenty of signs that things would get worse on policy, not better. Sunak had promised deportation flights to Rwanda – his flagship immigration policy – would finally take off in July. There were fears inside Number 10 that the courts, knowing Labour would junk the project, could delay the scheme. One Downing Street source claimed: “It was being made very clear to us by legal professionals that the judges were going to do everything possible, up to and including breaking legal precedent, to stop the flights.” 
Plus, a summer surge of small-boat crossings loomed as the weather improved, possibly further locking in signs that 2024 would break records despite a fall in numbers in 2023. This would undercut Sunak’s message of improvement.
Another red light was flashing over prisons. Ministers were being told prison places were about to run out, with officials pushing for urgent early releases. The problem could “blow up” if they waited until autumn. Some felt “the system” – aka the civil service – was increasingly resistant.
“It just totally clammed up,” said a Number 10 insider, feeling Whitehall’s focus turning to a probable Labour government. Then there were issues such as strikes. Another round of pay recommendations for teachers and doctors from independent review bodies were about to be submitted, which trade unions would demand were approved. “We were never going to pay the sort of sums that they wanted, and we would have had a summer beset by industrial action across the entire public sector,” said a member of the Sunak inner circle.
The second reason for not waiting longer was MP management. The Tory parliamentary party, bound together pretty loosely after hurt feelings from the year of three prime ministers, was beginning to come apart at the seams. Two Conservative MPs defected to Labour within a fortnight: Dan Poulter, the former health minister, switching on April 27 over the NHS, and Natalie Elphicke, the Dover MP on the party’s Right, flipping on May 8, citing border security.
The latter blindsided the Tory whips who had pulled together a list of half a dozen potential defectors that did not include Elphicke. Who else could abandon ship? Reform, ticking up in the polls, was seeking defections, too, its leader Richard Tice sounding out disillusioned Tories.
Word that a scandal-hit outgoing Conservative had been offered £10,000 to run for Reform reached the Tory whips – a claim denied by a source close to Tice. Added to this was the endless possibility that enough malcontents could submit 1922 Committee letters to trigger a no-confidence vote in Sunak. Simon Hart believed the number of letters was in the low 20s, about halfway to the threshold but still too close for comfort. 
Then there was the prospect of more Tory scandals. As one senior campaign figure bemoaned: “There is no strategy that’s good enough to withstand rolling f—–g sex pests and unending f—–g by-elections because of MP behaviour.” Going long meant more time for the Tory Party to further implode.
Thirdly, it was feared that the rosy economic news everyone was expecting later in the year might not come to pass. Tories were anticipating interest rate cuts, but Number 10’s top brass had spotted the markets pricing in fewer reductions than earlier in the year. Plus, the existence of so many fixed-rate deals meant many families would actually experience a jump in payments when remortgaging after a few years – and so would direct more anger at the party – even if the rates dropped a little. 
Hopes of a tax-cutting Budget giveaway in the autumn had also faded, with mega compensation payouts to the victims of the infected blood and Horizon IT scandals further tightening public finances. It all acted to dull the appeal of biding time.
But that was not all. There was a fourth factor. It went largely unsaid in the key meetings, according to those present, but was still detectable. Sunak was feeling a sense of “fatigue”. It was not, to be clear, a willingness to give up. The idea Sunak wanted to “end it all”, claimed by some, was “rubbish”, said one who knows him well. But it was something subtler: a political leader, relatively new to the scene and accustomed to success, taking flak for month after month after month with little respite. A man who believed hard work could solve most problems seeing no uptick in the polls despite all his efforts. In fact, the opposite: a decline in his own personal approval ratings, the prime minister becoming the butt of jokes where once he had been “dishy Rishi” the Covid chancellor. He was not dragging the Tory Party up; it was dragging him down.
One who had Sunak’s ear called it the “emotional element” in the decision, a sense of ‘the PM just wanting to “get this thing on with’. The grind “took its toll”, the source added, summarising Sunak’s thinking as: “What else is going to move the bloody dial? Do we just need to bring this to a head and call an election?” Another Downing Street insider echoed the thought: “The f—–g bombardment we were getting. He was absolutely beaten up. He was knackered.” It was “not a reason to go early itself” but contributed to the thinking, the source added. 
A third figure, one central in election-timing discussions, said of Sunak: “The job had made him a glass half-empty kind of guy, rather than half-full, because everything had gone against him. He was making a judgment that ‘everything is probably going to go against me, so sooner was better’.”
There was some resistance to the call in the Sunak camp. The central figures did not go “hammer and tongs” at each other; civility was maintained with everyone understanding there was no perfect date given the political terrain. But there were differences in advice, often reflecting the position in the Westminster ecosystem in which they operated. Dowden was the keenest on going in the summer, multiple sources say. His role at the centre of government made him acutely aware of the policy problems looming, though he is said to have expected the prime minister to “baulk” and go for autumn. Booth-Smith and Forsyth, always by Sunak’s side and sensitive to his personal outlook, both ended up convinced of the merits of July, acknowledging fears that things could deteriorate if they waited. 
Levido, however, offered the most push-back. As campaign manager focusing on the election, not government delivery, he had laid out a “plan is working” narrative that built towards an autumn vote. By then, interest rates would likely have been cut, the electorate would have had the summer to switch off and – who knew – maybe England could have won the Euros. Levido remained unconvinced of going in spring while acknowledging that others were closer to the policy problems. 
Ultimately all involved accepted it was Sunak’s call. So July 4 it was to be. The prime minister set in train the general election without telling Cabinet, asking King Charles to dissolve Parliament before informing his ministers on May 22, the day the public, too, was told. Some disapproved. Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, raised concerns in a pre-meeting of senior Cabinet ministers, telling Sunak: “I personally think it might have been better to wait.”
Esther McVey, dubbed the minister for “common sense”, spoke up in the wider Cabinet meeting: “I see it differently. I think it is a big mistake.’ Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, was less critical but made clear he favoured an autumn election. Others stayed silent despite reservations, one Cabinet minister likening the situation to a friend saying they are getting married tomorrow, asking you to be best man, then saying “any doubts?”
Perhaps the most damning indictment comes from past Tory election victors. It is understood almost none of the key players in recent Conservative successes would have gone for the summer over the autumn. Lord Cameron, who returned the Tories to office in 2010, “would not” have made that decision. Sir Lynton Crosby, who masterminded the Tory majority of 2015, was said to have been against it. 
George Osborne, who helped call the shots in both those races, favoured going as late as possible so the economic benefits of low inflation and returning growth could be felt. Michael Gove, who was at the top of the Brexit campaign, favoured putting “more runs on the board”, despite his warm words around the Cabinet table.
And as for Boris Johnson, deliverer of the 2019 landslide, one friend, who served in his government, said: “No one in their right mind who understands politics and cares for the party would have gone in July. Boris was not consulted and clearly is not stupid.’
And then it was time to go public. As usual, a podium was positioned in front of the door to Number 10 Downing Street. The dark clouds overhead had led the Sunak team to sketch out a back-up plan if the weather did not hold. The prime minister would call the election from the state rooms upstairs which could be used for political announcements – unlike regular government offices – as they were considered part of his residence. 
But the “dry launch” plan was left unused. Why? Because the forecasts suggested the weather was brightening, one Number 10 insider said. Another thought launching indoors would lead to “Sunak is scared of getting his hair wet” headlines. A third said, in the end, the prime minister made the call: “He felt quite strongly he should crack on and do it.”
The miscalculation was apparent within minutes. As Sunak laid out his pitch to the nation, a protester blared out Things Can Only Get Better by D:Ream. The song – Labour’s 1997 election anthem – could be heard clearly on TVs broadcasting the moment. And then the heavens opened. As the prime minister persisted, the shoulder pads of his dark suit jacket became visibly drenched and shiny. As his opponent Sir Keir Starmer would declare later: the man who claims his plan is working could not even find a brolly for the rain. The other side of the door, in the dry, Cabinet ministers watching along felt their hearts sink. One would later sum it all up: “Number 10 Drowning Street”.
The sodden Sunak announcing his election became the defining image of the campaign. But it was those preceding weeks, when the country’s leader and his small team of advisers risked it all on July 4, that rankled most with the Tories later swept away by the tsunami of public opinion. They see a group too willing to gamble their colleagues’ careers, too lacking in political nous. One Sunak Cabinet minister, red-hot with rage after being voted out, seethed: ‘It was a bloody stupid time to call an election. It was utter incompetence . . . You have just given up six to seven months of your premiership! It is always better to have a Conservative government.”
The ousted MP had a particular phrase for the prime minister’s behaviour: “punch-drunk”. A leader reeling from blows, his thinking becoming muddled. “It was a punch-drunkenness. It was a tragic mistake,” the source said. “How much worse could it really get? It could have gotten better.”
Blue Murder: The Rise and Fall of the Conservative Government, 2010–2024 by Ben Riley-Smith (John Murray, £12.99 paperback and also available as an audio and ebook) is published on August 29