The British prime minister gambled when he dissolved parliament and called elections for July 4th when he was about 20 points behind in the polls. For him to succeed in spite of that handicap would require everything to go right for him. And yet, there has been one thing after another that seems to be dragging him down.
It started with the announcement itself when a sudden downpour began when he was in the middle of delivering the news of parliament dissolution to the assembled press outside Downing Street. If the rain had started before the speech he could have changed the venue or the time. But since he had already started speaking, he had little choice but to gamely continue while getting soaked. It was not a good look and was considered an inauspicious start. Things have not gone better for him since.
There was the case of him cutting short a visit to France to celebrate D-Day to return to the UK for a TV interview. This was seen as disrespectful and he had to repeatedly apologize. Having to apologize for anything in the middle of a campaign is also not a good look.
And then we have the gambling issue. Gambling seems to be woven into the fabric of British life and bookmakers seem to be willing to give odds on all manner of things, not just sports. You may recall that odds were being offered as to whether Liz Truss’s premiership would outlast a head of lettuce. (It didn’t. If you bet £9 that the lettuce would win, you would have got £13.) Many people like to ‘have a flutter’, as they say, and the widespread acceptance of gambling can be contagious. My father was not a gambler at all but when we lived in the UK, he got caught up in the enthusiasm and would bet on the weekly football pools, where he would try to pick the results that were draws of each Saturday’s games, even though he knew next to nothing about soccer and never watched any games. He never won anything and when we returned to Sri Lanka, he did not gamble again. But in the UK, it just seemed to be the thing to do.
In this case, bookies were giving odds on various aspects of the election such as when Sunak might call it and whether he would be ousted before it. It turns out that some people close to Sunak had made bets on this and the fact that they may have had inside information has resulted in this being reported to the gambling authorities. In the UK, they take gambling seriously and using inside information is severely frowned upon.
The Gambling Commission has been urged to investigate a flurry of unusual activity around the time Sunak called the election, an industry source told the Guardian.
It includes a bet of £504, placed on the Sunday before the election was called, that Sunak would still be PM before the 2024 election. The implication is that the punter may have known that the election call was imminent, thus giving the Tory party no time to replace Sunak.
Marginal odds meant the punter stood to gain only £35 from the bet. Details of the bet have been provided to the commission by a professional gambler.
…Four Tory candidates and officials are under investigation by the Gambling Commission: Sunak’s top parliamentary aide, Craig Williams, the candidate for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr; the Tory candidate in Bristol West, Laura Saunders; her husband and the party’s director of campaigning, Tony Lee; and the party’s chief data officer, Nick Mason, who has denied wrongdoing.
An unnamed Metropolitan police officer who is part of Sunak’s close protection security team has been arrested in connection with the inquiry.
Embarrassingly, Sunak himself has had to deny placing any bets. There are apparently about 40 people who had knowledge of the election date prior to its public disclosure and it is not clear how many of them are being investigated.
I doubt that Sunak himself bet. Apart from being so wealthy that it would not matter to him, doing so would have been unbelievably stupid. But I am surprised that people close to him, like his top parliamentary aide Williams, would bet, knowing that their proximity to Sunak would draw suspicion. Also the payoff of a mere £35 from a bet of £504 hardly seems worth the risk.
None of these are major scandals but they all draw attention away from the little bit of good news that Sunak got, that inflation was down. A politician fighting an uphill battle cannot afford to deal with these kinds of distractions.
Interestingly, senior Conservatives are calling for an internal inquiry into the betting scandal. In the US, the GOP would have reacted to a similar situation involving their leader by claiming that betting with inside information, like cheating on taxes, is a sign that you are smart and know how to work the system.
This is not correct -- it was bucketing down well before he stepped outside. I watched it live. I watched them set up the lectern in the pouring rain. It was raining very heavily more-or-less all day, as I recall.
This is the worst bit of the whole tawdry business for me… I mean, we all already know that the Tories are venal and corrupt, that’s a given. But that they would indulge their venality and corruption in such an obviously stupid way, and for such absurdly tiny winnings? That’s just rubbing salt in the wound. Once again, it illustrates that they don’t just believe that the rules don’t apply to them, but that they can’t even concieve of the rules applying to them.
I doubt that Sunak himself bet. Apart from being so wealthy that it would not matter to him, doing so would have been unbelievably stupid. … Also the payoff of a mere £35 from a bet of £504 hardly seems worth the risk.
Well, this IS the party that gave us BoJo, Truss, Brexit, and Sunak (all by way of spinelessly refusing to make any actual choices)…
You overlook the attitude of entitlement. Of course they bet, if they can take advantage of inside knowledge. Of course they lie, because power rightfully belongs to them.
Dunc,
I was not aware that it had already started raining. That makes his actions even more inexplicable.
It’s explicable. He’s shit at politics.
@5:
What are your superpowers again?
How someone is both supposedly “shit at politics” and simultaneously the Prime Minister of the UK is left as an exercise for the reader.
Normally, people who are shit at something competitive tend not to win that competition, since other competitors are less shitty.
—
Also, he’s not in the top richest people: https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/uk-billionaires-2024-all-55-people-in-the-uk-worth-over-1-billion-ruck-list-richard-branson-james-dyson-4576863
For ref, https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/rishi-sunak-net-worth-prime-minister-family-wealth-explained-1270305 values “Mr Sunak and Ms Murty’s fortune at £651 million”.
(That’s about the same as Elton John is worth)
Wealthy people bet all the time, quite apart from betting on the Stock Exchange they bet on other things that interest them. There is a classic picture of Queen Elisabeth receiving her winnings after one of her racing horses won, in which she looks down at the money in her hand as if it is something totally new to her.
It’s really quite an easy exercise, because Sunak’s premiership came about as a result of a series of fortunate (?) events, few if any of which demonstrate any particular political skill:
1) Sunak married into serious wealth. Wealth, however acquired, impresses a lot of people, particularly conservatives.
2) David Cameron, when leader of the Conservative Party, made a strenuous and successful effort to improve the ethnic diversity of a previously almost wholly white parliamentary party. (Sunak was head of the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Research Unit of the conservative think tank Policy Exchange, for which he co-wrote a report on BME communities in the UK.)
3) Due to (1) and (2), Sunak became Conservative candidate for a safe seat, Richmond in Yorkshire, in the 2015 election. (The mystery here is why he wanted to enter politics at all -- some have speculated that his father-in-law N. R. Narayana Murthy thought it would be good for his (Murthy’s) business to have a member of the family high up in UK politics.)
4) Sunak chose the right side in the EU referendum campaign (again, Daddy-in-law’s influence is suspected). Teresa May appointed him to her government. (He had supported her in the leadership contest after his first choice, Michael Gove, was eliminated.) If the referendum had gone the other way (as it could easily have done), Sunak would probably still be an obscure backbencher.
5) On May’s resignation, Sunak supported Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as the next Tory leader, as did most Tory MPs. Johnson appointed him Chief Secretary to the Treasury, i.e. number 2 to the Chancellor (Sunak has genuine expertise in some aspects of finance from his earlier career in hedge funds).
6) Sajid Javid, the Chancellor, fell out with Johnson, who wanted to control who Javid appointed as advisors, and resigned. Sunak was willing to be Johnson’s puppet and so was appointed to succeed Javid.
7) The Covid pandemic gave him a huge boost in popularity as he was responsible for running the emergency support measures for individuals and businesses accompanying the lockdowns -- which were of course much against his and the Tories’ “free market” ideology, but without which the economy would have collapsed.
8) When Johnson got involved in one scandal too many and was ousted by his party, Sunak stood for the leadership but was defeated by Liz Truss (the party membership gets to vote between the last two candidates standing after initial rounds of voting among Tory MPs, and chose Truss over Sunak). That he got through the preliminary rounds is perhaps the best evidence of political skills, but he was coasting on (7).
9) Truss dismissed him as Chancellor, but was in turn was defeated by a lettuce. The Tory MPs decided they needed a new leader a.s.a.p., and couldn’t risk the membership voting Johnson back in, so Sunak was installed without a vote.
Since becoming PM, Sunak has completely failed to restore Tory fortunes (the dismal opinion polls being confirmed by a number of heavy defeats in by-elections). However, it’s fair to say this was a very difficult job. Starmer -- no great debater himself -- has generally had the better of their weekly clashes at PMQs (Prime Minister’s Questions). Sunak has tried a number of approaches to restoring Tory fortunes (technocratic safe pair of hands, change candidate, scourge of wokeness and asylum seekers), none of which have worked. So up to the calling of the election, one can say he has not demonstrated any great political skills as PM, but it’s not obvious anyone else could have done better. It’s the campaign itself that has confirmed that he’s shit at politics -- from choosing to go when he did apparently against advice and without consulting the cabinet (apparently taking his own party by surprise more than Labour, and pissing off all the colleagues who thought they should have been consulted, very few have been supporting him in the campaign), to where and when he announced, to the gobsmackingly stupid early return from D-Day celebrations (if you want one outstanding example of being shit at politics, this is it), to visiting the museum of the Titanic in Belfast, to his tardiness in suspending the two candidates suspected of betting on the election date using inside information.
Ok. [1..9] reasons adduced, to show that Sunak’s premiership came about as a result of a series of fortunate (?) events.
So, a very extreme outlier, right?
Shit political skills, yet got to assume the PM’s office in 24 October 2022, and remains there.
So, you’ve accounted (arguendo) for how Sunak’s premiership came about.
Perhaps another set of nine special circumstances that enabled him to stay in the job until (so far) today, I suppose.
And therefore, that skill at politics is not necessary when nine (9) things go in your favour.
So, he’s just been lucky, the recipient of a confluence of fortunate circumstances, as you see it.
Political skills: shit.
Luck: extreme.
(Got it)
Er… yes. Maybe you somehow haven’t noticed*, but UK politics has been in a highly febrile state for the past decade. Sunak came to power as the fifth PM (all Tories) in less than 7 years. In fact, there have never been 5 consecutive PMs from the same party, and you have to go back nearly a century to find 4 changes of PM within such a short period. Those less-than-7 years covered the Brexit referendum, several years of turmoil over the process of leaving the EU involving two general elections outwith the normal 4-5 year cycle, immediately followed by the pandemic, and with side orders of Trump’s presidency, defeat in Afghanistan, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sunak’s two predecessors were a Trump-like narcissist and pathological liar, and a batshit glibertarian ideologue who crashed the economy.
You’re not stupid John, but sometimes I think you must be pretending to be so. The fact that there had already been two Tory PMs ejected by their own party since the last election convinced even Tory MPs that making yet another change was not a good idea. The clamour for an immediate election would have been deafening, defying it would have made their position even worse, but they have been badly lagging in the polls throughout the period between The Day of the Lettuce, and today.
*Yes, I know you live in Australia, but you appear to be someone who pays a certain amount of attention to what goes on outside your own country.
…never before been 5 consecutive PMs from the same party…
So, a very extreme outlier, right?
Not at all — people like Sunak blunder into positions of power all the time, whenever any coalition of incompetent reactionaries and privileged idiots manage to get control of a country, or even just become a large but entrenched minority within it.
Just to add one more point to KG’s long list -- since 2016, a not-insignificant number of the most experienced, well-meaning and competent Tory MPs (for a somewhat loose definition of well-meaning and competent, that is) either left of their own accord, or were kicked out for showing insufficient loyalty to Johnson. Ever since they got rid of May as PM, there was an insistence that the party leader must have actively campaigned for Brexit, which excluded most of the tolerable options even if they stayed in the party, and by the time Truss went, there were a lot of the leftovers who were seen as too toxic for the electorate due to being embroiled in one scandal or another, or who had chosen the wrong side somewhere in all the internal party power struggles since Cameron left. They’ve been scraping the barrel for ministerial posts for a while and by the time Sunak was given the PM job, it was pretty clear that barring a miracle, the party was coming to the end of their time in office and whoever took it on would be the one who lost. I’m not sure anyone with longer term political ambitions would have wanted to be handed such a poisoned chalice, whereas Sunak can leave front line politics and re-enter finance, move to America, or simply take a few years off to write his autobiography in a shepherd’s hut in the garden.
I never understand why people post this sort of easily disproven bullshit. Didn’t you bother to google this before you parroted it?
https://www.euronews.com/2022/09/05/liz-truss-journey-from-remainer-to-brexiteer-in-her-own-words
Like I said at the time, Sunak probably took the job because he can put “first ever Asian/Hindo UK PM” on his CV, and nobody can take that away from him.
Rishi doesn’t want to win the election; he wants to bugger off and start a new life in California. But he also doesn’t want the Conservative Party to win.
It’s a classic spoiled-brat move. Bring the game to an end by knocking over the table, so he will be seen as a cheat as opposed to a loser. He has much less objection to the former, since he knows it to be true of himself and expects it to be true of everyone else.
@sonofrojblake -- fair point. To be honest, she made so little impression I’d forgotten if she actually stood for anything different prior to saying whatever she needed people to hear in her campaign to be PM! But I do maintain the insistence on unwavering support for that one single issue was what left them with no good choices for ministerial posts, and thus PM options, over the last few years.