“Is execution done on Cawdor?” asks King Duncan. Malcolm replies that indeed the act has been done and that Cawdor died a glorious death. “Nothing in his life” says Malcolm “became him like the leaving it”. It’s a precept that applies in politics. The way leaders win power and the way they relinquish power tell us a lot about who they are. It is an unflattering self-portrait Rishi Sunak painted today, alas.
To call a general election with your party in the order of 20 points behind in the opinion polls is evidence that you have simply given up. There is a perfectly good case that things may get worse for the Tory party. Maybe there will be no flights to Rwanda, no interest rate cuts and maybe there will be a summer of boat crossings reminding everyone of yet another government failure. Perhaps the Prime Minister would not even make it to the autumn. His critics have yet to coalesce around a successor but they might. It is entirely plausible that the best day to call the election – even though it is a terrible idea – is right now. Things can only get worse.
Yet that judgment of the prerogative of the analyst and the pundit. A characteristic of the best election winners – Thatcher, Blair, Johnson – is a combination of vast self-confidence and almost unrealistic optimism. The Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemann once said that if you have any gift to offer your children then may you give them optimism. A cock-eyed optimist would think “it is awful today but it may be better tomorrow”. Indeed, the truly self-confident leader would think “it will be better tomorrow because I am bloody well going to make it better; the election is not a destiny that will overwhelm me as I sit passively. Here, have some of that”. In the face of all the sage advice that it was all going south, the optimistic leader would say that, though they were unable to stop the tide, they were in the advanced stages of building a dam.
What would the dam look like at the fifty ninth minute of the eleventh hour? It would involve another budget in September at which the Chancellor would offer a series of tax cuts that would unfold over the next Parliament. It would involve the hope that the energy price cap would bite and that prices might fall. It would involve the hope that the Bank of England react to better than expected economic data by cutting interest rates. It would involve a bold and intriguing manifesto, published early and campaigned on hard. It would be the embodiment of the claim, the only one that could work even a little, that Britain is on the right track and that we should not turn back.
Maybe there is another set of things that the unabashed optimist would do. But something at least. Do something. Don’t, whatever you do, declare an election when you are standing on the edge of oblivion. Mr Sunak has said, in effect, that he will choose certain defeat over the slim possibility of something more. He has given up and this is the character point. A serious leader would have to be dragged away. They would have tried everything first. Rishi Sunak has tried almost nothing. The job has proved beyond him and nothing makes that more obvious than the leaving of it.
He seems entirely fed up by everything - principally the lack of gratitude from the public for his sacrifice. It's not an attractive look. We have to wait and see whether the country is sadistic enough (and masochistic enough, too) to force him to endure another term in rainy London rather than sun himself in California.
The ineptitude of giving an interminably boring speech in the pouring rain, when they already knew that someone had that song attached to a loudspeaker, just says it all...