Tale of campaign contrasts as UK parties step out on day one

Good morning. And we’re off! Rishi Sunak has stunned much of Westminster, including essentially the whole of the Conservative party, and uh, the author of this newsletter, by calling an election earlier than he needs to. The UK will go to the polls on July 4 and barring something unforeseen, the Labour party will enter government.

In practice, it is a surprise election that is predominantly a surprise for the prime minister’s own party. The opposition parties have always known that one of the many things they could not control or predict was when Sunak decided to go to the country. They have been on an election footing for a long time.

In a measure of that, the Labour party has finished its selections in the marginal seats, with the only remaining vacancies being in places the party either does not need to win or already holds. The latter will be parcelled up and shared between Labour’s power brokers. The Liberal Democrats, as luck would have it, completed their selection in Sutton and Cheam, the trickiest of their London targets, and have, likewise, got their ducks in a row in terms of selections.

The Conservative party is far from prepared, and the July poll has surprised and indeed horrified some Tory MPs, who feel like they have been denied the expected amount of time to work out what they are going to do next.

However, there are some major advantages to Sunak going now rather than waiting until later. The cost of compensating victims of the infected blood and Post Office scandals — do read this brilliant Robert Shrimsley column on both of those if you haven’t yet — coupled with Sunak’s pledge to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030 mean the next fiscal event is going to be very nasty.

That is before accounting for any of the public services that most people use — hospitals, and schools — and the ones that only a minority of us come into contact with, such as prisons and policing. These are a vital part of making us feel safe and assured that the government is upholding its end of the bargain. All in all, large sums were going to have to be found just to keep Sunak’s promises.

As George Parker explains in his piece on the economic factors underlying yesterday’s announcement, Jeremy Hunt had indicated to colleagues that the public finances were not going to be in good enough shape to go ahead with his trailed 2p cut in National Insurance.

There is also the added political benefit that it is, I think, unlikely in the extreme that the Reform party, who were only able to stand 323 council candidates in the local elections, are going to find 632 candidates to stand across Great Britain. This morning Nigel Farage, Reform’s president, said that he will not be standing as a candidate in the election. The Conservative party will be better off not facing a party that can siphon off votes to its right flank as well as the numerous parties doing so to its left. As Ben Ansell writes in his Substack, this is the biggest political dividend the prime minister is going to get out of going to the country in July.

But the Conservative party did not face a Reform candidate in the overwhelming majority of its defeats at the local elections at the start of this month. It still did incredibly badly. More importantly, the machine and the prime minister remain in place.

We’ll have much, much more to say in this newsletter about the parties’ strategies, their policy programmes and how this election is being fought and covered for the next six weeks. Please do email in with specific questions and do keep sending me pictures of the campaign literature you see on your social media and in your letterboxes. For now, some thoughts on how England’s three parties handled day one of the election campaign.

D:Railed

Rishi Sunak launched his election campaign in the pouring rain. Protesters in Westminster were playing music that at times made him near inaudible. In a particularly pleasing dramatic touch, one of them was D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better”, the dreadful tune that was New Labour’s anthem in 1997.

The clip of him — so wet that it looked like he was wearing a suit made of leather — on the BBC News at 10 did not look good. The audio was poor quality. Radio clips last night were, similarly, lacking in quality and it was not clear what clip the prime minister was even hoping to get. I learnt from reading our excellent, catty piece about how Sunak surprised Westminster with his summer election gambit that he was still wearing his rain-soaked trousers at his rally at the ExCeL Centre in London.

I’m not saying that any of this stuff matters electorally. However, a campaign that can’t master “ensure the candidate is not still wearing wet clothes, is not drenched on TV and does not have his voice drained out by a protester who has been out and about in Westminster for the past eight years”, is unlikely to finish stronger than it started unless it sharpens up pretty quickly.

Moments after Sunak finished speaking, the Labour party released a slick video. Its most recent version was recorded relatively recently, but it has been re-recorded and finessed over time. It’s the message that Labour has pushed for some time — what do we want? Non-threatening change! When do we want it? At a pace that won’t scare middle England! Starmer then appeared in person, indoors, in front of two Union Jack flags. The message has all the subtlety of an atomic bomb, but political messages shouldn’t be subtle. (A good rule of thumb in this election is, the more I am having to explain in this newsletter what a political party is trying to convey, the worse its campaign.)

The Liberal Democrats also came out well thanks to a stroke of genius by one of Ed Davey’s aides. They reasoned that while an election might not be called today, they should in any case travel to Surrey, where the party hopes to win a slew of seats. The result was a news hit that the party could not have written better themselves: Davey looked every inch like he belongs in Surrey, wearing a nice Barbour jacket and talking about how the Lib Dems are the only lever to pull if you want to defeat the Conservatives in that part of the world.

Frankly, the party whose campaign looks like it has been ambushed by this election was the one that called it. Given the Conservatives must confront an uphill climb in this election, Tory MPs are right to be worried — while the spring in the step of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs looks, at this stage, justified.

Now try this

The UK’s looming election means that there will be a sharp deterioration in the quality and breadth of the suggestions at the bottom of this newsletter. Previous elections suggest that what you have to look forward to includes “easy and quick vegetarian Italian recipes”, “12 good restaurants in marginal constituencies that won’t treat solo diners like lepers” and “comfort watching children’s TV because you are too zonked to do anything else with an evening”.

That said, I love elections. I always think of my South African grandfather, who never lived to vote in a democratic election — as a member of the Cape Malay population, he lost his right to vote shortly after my grandmother arrived here in the 1960s. It’s a beautiful and rare thing we will be able to do in July. Sticking on the subject of South Africa, I really enjoyed Alec Russell’s recent essay on Cyril Ramaphosa’s life, works and his final election campaign.

Following the upcoming European Parliamentary elections, a host of top journalists and experts will look at what they mean for the EU in a webinar on June 12. FT subscribers can sign up here and send questions to the panel.

Top stories today

• Starmer promises calm | Labour leader Keir Starmer said he had changed his party and now wanted to change the country and “return Britain to the service of working people”. “We will stop the chaos,” added Starmer. “A vote for Labour is a vote for stability — economic and political.”

• Hopeful Rishi | Rebutting claims that economic growth in the UK had been “miserable” in comparison with the US over the long term, Rishi Sunak alluded to “gangbusters” growth in the first quarter of the year. GDP in the UK grew 0.6 per cent in the first quarter, compared with 0.4 per cent in the US. However, quarter-on-quarter growth in the US has outpaced that of the UK for six of the past seven quarters.

• ‘Too trusting’ | Paula Vennells denied there was a conspiracy by the Post Office to hide information about flaws in its Horizon system, as she broke down in tears and apologised for the suffering caused by the scandal.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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