The New Yorker:

After fourteen years of Conservative rule, how will Labour pick up the pieces?

By Sam Knight

The British general election, which will take place on July 4th, was over before it began. Five and a half weeks ago, under a merciless shower of cold spring rain, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who is doomed to defeat, stood outside 10 Downing Street and said that he had asked the King to dissolve Parliament. “Now is the moment for Britain to choose its future,” Sunak said, as brightly as he could.

The British political system gives incumbent governments a clear advantage, allowing them to choose when to call an election, as long as it happens at least every five years. Sunak, who leads the Conservative Party, was playing with a deadline of January, 2025, and most people—including most members of his party—thought that he would wait until October or November, in the hope that the economy might improve a bit, or for one of his flagship policies (for instance, the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda) to take effect. But instead, with his party some twenty-two points behind Labour in the polls, Sunak went early. “The Shakespeare quote ‘In delay there lies no plenty,’ I think, was in his mind,” a senior Cabinet minister told me. It was an example of what Sunak likes to call bold action. “Now, I cannot and will not claim that we have got everything right. No government should,” Sunak said, as the rain came down and the end-times of fourteen years of dispiriting Conservative rule were, finally, at hand. “But I am proud of what we have achieved together. The bold actions we have taken.”

Go to link