Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has just called for a general election on the 4th of July amid the worst polling numbers for his party in nearly a generation and did so in the pouring rain at the lectern right in front of that famous black door in Downing Street with loud music blaring from speakers just outside the Downing Street gates by a group of protesters.
That’s not exactly the scene you’d really want to announce a general election where your only real pitch seems to be “stick with the Conservatives for brighter days ahead” in the face of stubbornly high inflation and energy/mortgage bills, dreadfully long queues in A&E and the NHS that are only getting longer, and the ongoing chaos of Brexit and illegal immigration at the borders!
To be sure, he wasn’t required to actually ask His Majesty the King to formally prorogue and dissolve Parliament for a general election until January of 2025 as Parliament sessions last a maximum of five years from their first sitting after an election.
Today’s announcement certainly caught more than a few MPs by surprise who had resigned themselves to a general election sometime in the autumn after the Conservatives had been thoroughly destroyed in the local elections in May.
It seems abundantly clear that the Prime Minister and a majority in Cabinet don’t see the domestic political situation improving significantly where the more reputable polls have the election as Labour well ahead and some are even suggesting that the Tories may well not be the largest party in opposition after the election as they’re losing in many constituencies to Reform UK, the successor to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
I’m finding it hard to disagree that the Conservatives in government will be judged by the public to have been well past their expiry date after fourteen years in power with the last three Prime Ministers being the buffoonish Boris Johnson, Liz Truss whose brief tenure crashed the domestic economy and her premiership couldn’t outlast a lettuce, and Rishi Sunak who has shown a consistent and stunning clumsiness in politics for someone who had such a meteoric rise from obscurity on the back benches four years ago to the top of the greasy pole a little under two years ago.
Sunak’s signature policy whilst in Number 10 is this daft plan of his to ship asylum seekers who cross the English Channel in small boats off to Rwanda in the middle of Africa (and hell and gone from where those people are originally coming from). The Rwanda scheme has already cost British taxpayers 400m pounds sterling (and climbing!) paid to Rwanda to build some small housing enclaves that has yet to see a single asylum seeker sent there.
In fairness, Rishi Sunak has been dealt a harsh political hand following in the footsteps of his feckless and shambolic predecessors and has managed in some ways to eclipse their failures by failing to address his wife’s non-dom status that has allowed them to avoid quite a bit of tax from HMRC and Inland Revenue and amass quite the tidy fortune.
He’s climbed the pinnacle of the greasy pole that is British politics as one of the richest to ever be Prime Minister. He’s made his mark in history of being the first British PM of Asian descent and now he’s likely to go swanning off to a new home and life in California once his party is thoroughly destroyed in the coming election and not look back whilst enjoying his millions of pounds in retirement.
Should the election go as expected, Labour will likely win a comfortable majority that they can govern without having to have a coalition partner and that would usher in Sir Keir Starmer as the newest inmate at HM Prison Number 10 Downing Street.
With the domestic mess and international strife he’s likely to inherit, Sir Keir may well find that having isn’t such a wonderful thing as wanting and that being in HM Loyal Opposition is often a far easier job than being HM Government. With his immediate predecessors being an imbecile, a lettuce, and a buffoon…it’s hard to imagine his government could do much worse than they did.
We won’t have very long to wait to find out. Unlike the torturous Presidential election cycles in this country that come every four years and increasingly are lasting the entire four years between them, a general election in the UK is a relatively swift affair.
- HM The King is asked to prorogue Parliament on advice of the Privy Council which occurred earlier today when the PM had his customary weekly audience at Buckingham Palace.
- Parliament is prorogued by proclamation in the House of Lords and then the House of Commons which will likely happen tomorrow with the actual date Parliament is prorogued likely to be 30 May. This gives the Government and Opposition time to agree on which bills that are currently being considered but have yet to receive the Royal Assent will be allowed to carry over to the next Parliament and gives the government departments time enough to tidy up loose ends before the government effectively enters a holding pattern where no significant actions requiring Parliamentary action will be taken.
- Once Parliament is officially prorogued, the clock starts on the general election campaign which runs for about five weeks. That is not a typo…five weeks is all the parties get to convince the voters to tick their choices on the ballot papers in their favour! That’s kind of refreshing compared to the long-drawn out campaigns well before the primaries and the general elections in this country!
- The general election occurs and the ballots counted and the leader of the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons will be invited by HM The King to form a new government in their name. Should that leader already command a majority in the house, they will “kiss hands” to signify their allegiance to the Sovereign and off to Number 10 they go to serve their custodial sentence as Prime Minister.
- The newly elected government will draft a statement for the King to deliver during the State Opening of Parliament and then it’s off to the Commons for the first debate on the Most Gracious Speech and the clock starts ticking away at the five years this Parliament may run before another general election must be called.
So that’s the background for a general election now set for the 4th of July.
That seems more than a little bit ironic as the United Kingdom through the ages has likely inspired more independence days than any other in history!
Will the British choose independence from the Tory rule they’ve had for the past fourteen years? The polls are suggesting otherwise with the biggest gap between Labour and the Conservatives yet but a lot can change in the coming five weeks.
This year, the fireworks aren’t just on our Independence Day! 🙂