Rishi Sunak’s election text comes from the Scottish play. Like Macbeth, the prime minister reasons that “if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”. If this irritates his party then so much the better, for Sunak is neither the first nor the last leader of the Conservative Party to discover that, actually, he doesn’t much care for the Conservative Party.
That is one way of reading the prime minister’s decision to run to the country some months before he absolutely needed to call an election. Plenty of his colleagues in the House of Commons were taken by surprise; so were some of his cabinet colleagues. David Cameron, the foreign secretary, reportedly told the prime minister that his decision to seek an election was “bold”. That, as you know, is Westminster code for “mad” or “suicidal”.
Nonetheless, Sunak’s thinking is not illogical. In the first place, holding on until November in the Micawberish hope that “something will turn up” to rescue Tory fortunes required the prime minister and those closest to him to place their faith in some kind of celestial salvation for whose existence there was precisely zero evidence.
The sorry truth — from a Conservative perspective anyway — is that goodwill was exhausted long ago. We have reached the point in the political cycle in which even successes, if such things can be found, are discounted by a grumpy public whose appetite for a change of government is palpable.
Hence the risk of holding on for as long as possible. Doing so might only exasperate an electorate whose patience with this government has already passed breaking point. If that were the case, there is a good argument for going to the country while you are 20 points behind in the polls rather than 25.
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This, then, is a damage limitation exercise. Some of Sunak’s colleagues believe this amounts to a declaration of surrender but they might pause to consider the possibility he has run out of patience with them just as much as the public has with his government. For months, Tory backbenchers have been gaming scenarios in which they could launch a putsch against the prime minister. Who could blame him for at least putting an end to that kind of lunatic self-indulgence?
So, since it is going to be awful anyway, we might as well get it over and done with. If nothing else, a thumping election defeat will allow Sunak to lead a more comfortable life, some place agreeably far removed from Westminster.
Here in Scotland, of course, the Tories may outperform their colleagues elsewhere for the first time since John Major took his soapbox around north Britain on a “Save the Union” tour in 1992. Allowing for boundary changes, the Scottish Conservatives have a chance of retaining most, or even all, the six seats they took five years ago. Scotland is not likely to become a “Tory-free zone”.
Those votes are not so much pro-Tory ballots as they are anti-SNP ones. In southern and northeast Scotland, who you are not matters more than who you are. And most voters in these places are not SNP.
• Seven key issues for the general election in Scotland
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That Tory-SNP rammy is the undercard to the main event pitting Labour against the nationalists across the central belt. Labour expectations are now in danger of overreaching the party’s grasp. Two years ago, a dozen seats would have been considered a more than respectable result; now some optimists dare dream of taking 30. If I were asked to advise Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar, I would recommend dialling expectations back a bit.
Still, Labour’s pitch is at least a straightforward one: if you want a change of government you have to vote for it. By contrast, the SNP is reduced to making the case that only it can truly “stand up for Scotland” even though, by definition, all this standing up is confined to the opposition benches. Labour can ask voters to elect government MPs, not opposition ones who may only carp from the sidelines.
What we may all agree on is that barring a miraculous Conservative victory, this election will not advance the cause of Scottish independence by so much as half an inch. The national question will not be answered, for the very good reason that it is not on the examination paper. Independence is not buried but nor is it going anywhere, no matter how much the SNP may try to pretend otherwise. July 4 is no kind of independence day.
Nor, though, should it be assumed that heavy losses for the SNP mean the party is doomed to defeat at the Holyrood elections in 2026. Some voters will be happy to vote Labour in a UK election before returning to the SNP at Holyrood. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that Holyrood, not Westminster, is now the electoral arena that really counts for the nationalists.
Still, this is a change election and that bodes ill for the SNP. Their own record in government ought not to be on the ballot paper but plenty of voters will behave as though it is. Here the nationalists suffer from the sense of malaise, rot and failure all too apparent across government and the public sector in Britain today.
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And what can the SNP offer? John Swinney is an upgrade on his predecessor but the whole point of choosing a safe-pair-of-hands leader is lost as soon as he starts dropping the ball. In this instance, Swinney’s defence of Michael Matheson does not seem likely to impress a public which, fairly or not, has already concluded that the former health secretary is a cheat.
Whatever else it may be, Swinney’s decision to oppose the standards committee’s suggestion that Matheson be suspended from parliament is as “brave” as Sunak’s decision to call an early election is “bold”.
Like Sunak, Swinney has been asked to restore a sense of normalcy to his party. But, like Sunak, he is liable to discover that a party’s capacity for reinvention has a half-life that all but disappears after more than a dozen years in office. What might work in theory no longer actually works in practice. Change? Change is the other guy now. That’s the real meaning of this election. It will be done quickly and it will be done brutally.
