Election 2024: Sunak has sprung a trap on himself

A sublime level of mismanagement, operating at a scale we never previously thought possible.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Selection is the latest godforsaken shitshow. It's got it all: the capacity for disastrous political scandals right at the business end of the campaign, an explanation for why we get such terrible MPs and a refutation of Rishi Sunak's central electoral argument. Just a sweet, sweet little package of unforced errors. No wonder he couldn't help himself.

Yesterday Tory HQ sent out an email seen by Channel 4's Paul McNamara desperately looking for candidates in nearly 100 seats. Loads of them are places they've no chance of winning - Holborn and St Pancras, for instance, or Manchester Central - places that will remain Labour until the heat death of the universe. Often aspiring MPs will take seats like that as part of a ten-year plan - increase your party's vote in a hopeless seat, then increase it in a slightly less hopeless seat in the election after that, then finally hope they'll recognise your work with a marginal in the election following that one. But in a contest like this, with the tide turning against your party, there's really very little incentive to stand in the middle of Manchester with a blue rosette having people call you a twat for a month and a half. They'll find someone, I guess, but by Christ they'll need to be very weird.

It's in seats like these that you can end up with your problem cases - someone who seems perfectly fine in the fortnight you give yourself to assess them but who turns out to have written a racist-uncle post on Facebook 18 months back. And once they're selected, Labour HQ will have people trawling through social media trying to find the worst thing they've ever said. It's a breeding ground for late-campaign problems.

Not all the seats are hopeless. There are some proper Tory constituencies in there, like Basildon and Billericay. Rock solid with a large majority of over 20,000. In cases like these it's even worse. In all likelihood, whoever becomes the candidate will become the next MP, barring a Labour win of biblical flood proportions. And yet this is the extent of the scrutiny that person will get - a panicked email sent out hours into an election, with a whiplash-inducing timetable. That person could end up in the Commons for a generation. 

Some of the seats are pretty marginal. Leicester East, for instance, has a Labour majority of just over 6,000. Leicester West has a Labour majority of just over 4,000. If you were serious about staying in power, or even - no laughing at the back - expanding it, you'd have a plan for seats like that. Others, like East Worthing and Shoreham are really pretty vulnerable Tory seats. It has a majority of just over 7,000. And yet they are just now picking their candidate to defend these types of seats, with a bare minimum of diligence and preparation.

Labour also has seats to fill. We're not sure entirely how many, but PoliticsHome estimates that the party has about 100 places to fill, while the Tories have 200. The difference, and it is a very big one, is that Labour has mostly chosen its marginal seats. Why? Because it's been operating to a plan, set in the early days of the Starmer leadership by campaign manager Morgan McSweeney. 

The first stage of that plan, in the wake of the 2019 defeat, was to get the patient on the operating table and remove the cancer. This involved having the Starmer-dominated National Executive Committee taking control of the selection of candidates at the long-listing stage. The clear intention was to prevent anyone with a whiff of magic grandpa getting anywhere near the process. Heavy-handed centralised party control? Absolutely. Effective? Yes. What it means right now is that Labour is more prepared on candidate selection than the Conservatives are.

The maddest part of this, of course, is that the Tories called the fucking election. Through some inexplicable contortion of political logic, they have succeeded in springing a trap on themselves. Of all the pros and cons that Sunak had to weigh up, did he even bother to consider this element of things? The boring, nuts-and-bolts practical implications of the decision he was taking? It's hard to tell. Certainly he shows every indication of finding such things beneath the level of his attention. 

There's a dream-like quality to what we're seeing at the moment, a sleep-logic to the strange behaviour on display. The Labour machine appears well oiled, primed, ready to go. Starmer, galaxy-brained strategic genius that he is, understood that it was better to launch an election from inside when it was raining. Each video the party puts out is effective, modern and uplifting, complimenting through tone what it hopes to assert with language. 

The Tory machine, on the other hand, looks like it falls apart at the slightest investigation. Within the first 24 hours, it's seen TV news reporters manhandled out of campaign events by bodyguards, cringe-inducing moments with the prime minister trying to speak to ordinary people about football, and Tory councillors dressed up in high viz is-this-what-normal-people-wear cosplay to ask the prime minister imaginary questions. 

The ability to choose when to call the election is one of the strongest weapons in the prime minister's armoury. And yet he has managed to fire that weapon in a way that seemed to destabilise him far more than his opponent, with selection being a key example.

This procedure undermines Sunak's central argument in the election. We know that argument very well now, god help us, and we'll know it even better in a few weeks time, if any of us are still alive by then: He has a plan, stick to the plan, don't go back to square one. And yet the election campaign he is running shows no signs of a plan at all. It's like an arse running around trying to find out if there is a head attached to it. It demonstrates the precise same qualities we have witnessed in Conservative governance over the last god-knows-how-many years - inadequacy, ineptitude, incompetence, fundamental lack of seriousness. Rishi Sunak is the human refutation of his own propositions.

Odds and Sods

I'm launching a new series of books alongside my Origin Story co-host Dorian Lynskey. The first three are Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory. They're short, super-readable primers on the key ideas in modern politics, but told as stories, full of boisterous personalities and moments of high tension. They really are the dog's bollocks, I've got to say. We've been working away furiously on these in the background and are really proud of them. Although obviously his use of semi-colons and brackets - dear God the fucking brackets - remains unforgivable. 

You can pre-order all three here. It's useful to us if you do this, apparently. I have no idea why. I think it makes us look good with the bookshops? The whole industry's a bafflement. But if you are going to get them when they come out, then do go ahead and grab them now - we'd love that.

Also: Look at how sexy they are. I mean, come on.