Howard Anglin: Sunak sputters, Starmer slithers, and British voters shrug as the U.K. election limps on

The United Kingdom is more than halfway through a general election, but I’ve yet to see any public evidence of it. If you don’t read the papers or follow politicians or political commentators on social media—and most well-adjusted people don’t—you might have no idea the country is on the verge of a political earthquake. I haven’t overheard a single conversation about the election in the streets and I can count on one hand the number of candidate signs I’ve seen displayed—all for minor parties.

Then again, after July 4th, “minor parties” might include the ruling Conservative Party. I lunched this week with a friend whose job it is to predict these things, and he thinks the Tories will be lucky to get 50 seats. Considering the U.K. Parliament is about twice the size of the Canadian Parliament, that is like Trudeau’s Liberals being reduced to less than 25 seats. It’s almost unthinkable (and for the record, I don’t think it will be quite that bad, but my prediction of about 100 seats puts me squarely in the delusional optimists’ camp).

It is fair to ask how much could reasonably have been expected of Rishi Sunak as prime minister. He inherited the millstone of more than a decade of ineffectual Tory government with only a little over a year to remove it from his neck. In another year, the modest progress he has made on inflation and migration might have earned him the benefit of the doubt from a sceptical electorate, but we will never know. As it is, he didn’t even give himself the extra six months he was entitled to when he called this early election.

The snap election call surprised almost everyone, including apparently his own campaign managers.