How the Tory election campaign melted down in 6 disastrous weeks

4 months ago 2

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LONDON — The night before Rishi Sunak called the general election that would devastate the U.K. Conservative Party, he summoned David Cameron to Downing Street.

Cameron, the foreign secretary, was due to travel to Albania the following morning. He was standing in for Sunak on the trip, and assumed the PM wanted to talk about security details in person.

In fact, Sunak had a jaw-dropping message for his predecessor.

The prime minister had decided to call a snap general election — and would be telling the nation in less than 24 hours. The Albania trip would have to be cut short so Cameron could rubber-stamp the decision at an emergency Cabinet meeting with colleagues the following afternoon.

Westminster was expecting an autumn election. While prime ministers have considerable control over the timing of elections, Sunak was required by law to call a vote by January 2025 and, with his Conservative Party far behind in the polls, it was widely assumed he would give himself as long as possible to close the gap.

Cameron, of course, knows a thing or two about elections. In 2010 as Conservative leader, he brought the party back into government for the first time in over a decade, albeit in coalition. At the following election in 2015, he returned to Downing Street with an outright majority — the party’s first since 1992.

But Sunak wasn’t asking Cameron for his view. The election was decided. He was just giving one of his most experienced ministers a heads-up. He wanted to talk logistics.

Cameron was one of the lucky ones. Sunak told most of his other Cabinet ministers the following day, shortly before the plan was made public — and after he had seen King Charles III to enact the decision.

Within the Cabinet, only Sunak’s closest ally Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, had been in on the plan from the start. Sunak’s Chief of Staff Liam Booth-Smith had given Chancellor Jeremy Hunt a similar heads-up to Cameron. Others in the tight circle of knowledge included Sunak’s campaign manager Isaac Levido, Political Secretary James Forsyth and Communications Director Nerissa Chesterfield.

If Cameron was put out about being presented with a fait accompli, he didn’t show it. He said he would back Sunak, and was the first voice to speak up in support of the prime minister when the Cabinet meeting came less than 24 hours later.

By the time the fateful Cabinet meeting wrapped up the following afternoon, it had started to rain. Undeterred, Sunak strode out into Downing Street to announce a vote on July 4. “These uncertain times call for a clear plan,” the prime minister declared, as he became slowly drenched in a biblical downpour. The mockery began before he’d even finished his speech.

Failing to pick up an umbrella was Sunak’s first mistake. There would be multiple others before the Tories finally spiraled into oblivion and handed Labour its historic landslide.

Sunak was pilloried for skipping a world leaders’ event commemorating D-Day veterans in France; he was slow to act as an extraordinary gambling scandal engulfed his campaign; and — most important of all — he underestimated long-standing Conservative bête noire Nigel Farage, who launched a bid to wipe the Tories out for good.

Some critics maintain calling the election itself was a mistake. Sunak did not need to go to the polls before the start of 2025. After almost a decade of Conservative chaos and division since the Brexit vote, plus the scandals of the Boris Johnson premiership, the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation from the Ukraine war and the economic implosion of the Liz Truss regime, Britain was still reeling.

Waiting might have seen the economic picture improve further, and allowed Brits to feel the nation had “turned a corner,” as Sunak had been insisting was the case. It might also have given Sunak time to implement his flagship plan to tackle the hot-button issue of illegal immigration, by deporting new arrivals to Rwanda.

But those around the prime minister argue waiting longer could have made the situation worse. The Rwanda plan had been contested repeatedly in the courts and might remain stuck. With every passing month, thousands more homeowners would see their mortgage bills soar as they came off cheaper fixed-rate deals which typically last for a couple of years — most of them blaming the Tories for the increased cost. Sunak could have looked a desperate man, clinging on until the last minute as the clamor for an election grew.

The debate went on for months among Sunak and his tight circle of aides. Levido wanted to wait. Others disagreed.

But what Cameron, Hunt and other senior ministers thought was irrelevant. “It was too late to say anything, other than to offer my support,” Cameron told a colleague after the election had been called.

Ultimately, Sunak gambled on his own instincts, and those of his closest advisers. That gamble turned a losing hand into a catastrophe.

The following account of how Sunak led the Tories to their historic defeat is based on interviews conducted throughout the past six weeks, with more than 40 people who worked in or around the main campaigns, almost all on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

Getting off on the wrong foot

The morning after the election was called, Downing Street Chief of Staff Liam Booth-Smith summoned Conservative special advisers to a 10 a.m. meeting in No.10 to give them their marching orders.

The mood was sour. The election had appeared out of nowhere, and the aides’ ministerial bosses had all been sidelined. One former Cabinet minister said it was “bad politics” for Sunak to go to the king before getting sign-off from his top team, leaving them less invested in his plan than they might otherwise have been.

That bad blood had infected some special advisers — SpAds as they are known in Westminster. Booth-Smith managed to turn that bad blood cold.

As is usual in British politics, he conveyed a message that all SpAds except those in critical departments would have their contracts terminated that weekend. Aides could then volunteer for roles in the campaign, but would be expected to work for free. Those who did not intend to take part, he said, should come and see him in his office.

Booth-Smith has since insisted that he was simply asking colleagues to let him know about potential contractual issues, as he did not want staff to lose out. But at least three special advisers who were in the meeting interpreted his words as some kind of threat.

“Lots of people left that meeting thinking: ‘Fuck him. Fuck the PM. Fuck all this. I’m going to go look for a job,’” said one.

To make matters worse, Sunak had not been prime minister for two years, meaning many of his advisers would not qualify for a government pension and longer severance pay. Many in the room had a very tangible reason to hope for an autumn election.

As a result, numerous advisers simply didn’t bother turning up to Conservative campaign headquarters (CCHQ) to join in the fight. Others who were willing to take part never even heard back from campaign chiefs. At least one chased bosses, desperate for a role, but never received a response. The Conservative machine was running headlong into an existential battle with key troops missing in action.

By contrast, Keir Starmer’s Labour was ready for war. Campaign chief Morgan McSweeney had prepared the party machine for a May election. But when the spring poll didn’t materialize, he began updating his plans on a rolling basis.

Event venues had been booked, staff had been allocated roles, advertising space had been secured and leaflets prepared. Sunak’s gambit to catch his opponents on the hop had all but failed.

“They pleasantly surprised themselves that they weren’t taken by surprise,” said Peter Mandelson, a grandee of Tony Blair’s New Labour regime who has helped advise Starmer.

Surprise your own side

Instead it was the Tory machine which was stuttering into action. The decision had been held so tight no one else in the party seemed ready.

Sunak was forced to ditch his flagship smoking ban, among other promises, because the snap election had left too little time for Tory whips to usher the new laws through parliament. The mother of a terror victim said Sunak “misled” her when he promised in a meeting, hours before he called the election, that he would make progress on her demand for new laws before the summer.

Minor gaffes in Sunak’s opening campaign events also made headlines. Conservative councilors were unmasked posing as members of the public asking questions. Worse, Sunak jovially asked Welsh voters — whose nation had failed to qualify for football’s European Championships — if they were looking forward to the tournament. A visit to the Titanic Quarter in Belfast wrote its own jokes. A narrative was being set.

A wave of Conservatives deciding not to stand again added to the sense of momentum against Sunak. Long-standing Cabinet minister Michael Gove and former leadership hopeful Andrea Leadsom, who quit from a sunbed in Crete, were among them. Craig Mackinlay, who had pledged to stand again as the “bionic MP” after having his limbs amputated due to sepsis, said he needed more rehabilitation time. He had made his triumphant return to the Commons hours before Sunak called the election.

The first big announcement from the Conservative campaign, to force teenagers to do national service, suffered a turbulent landing. The plan dominated headlines, but polls showed the public were divided on the idea. Mockery, again, was widespread. Ministers tied themselves up in media interviews over whether teens would be penalized for refusing to take part. One minister, Steve Baker, condemned the plan outright — while revealing he was on vacation in Greece.

Conservative activists on the ground were furious at the situation they were placed in. Regional chairs had met 24 hours before the election was called to discuss their preparations for an October or November vote. There were still more than 100 seats without Tory candidates, and no infrastructure in place to fight an election. Candidates were told to quickly submit their campaign materials online that weekend. The platform immediately crashed.

“Launching the first attack by shooting yourself in the head doesn’t look so clever,” said one experienced strategist.

Senior Conservative aides admitted the desperation to avoid leaks about the election date had made it impossible to prepare for the fight. “We paid a price for being so fixated on keeping it a secret,” one said.

At the start of 2024 Sunak’s small team had decided a spring election was not realistic, but few expected to be waiting until the fall. Levido, Booth-Smith and others had tried to quietly prepare as much as possible. Adam Atashzai and Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, both former special advisers, had returned to government in August 2023 to beef up campaign plans — including a rolling election news grid — on the expectation of a snap poll.

But the difficult start instantly prompted the beginnings of a blame game, with some of the Downing Street circle pointing fingers at Levido, given campaign mechanics were his responsibility. Others argued Sunak’s tight-knit team — and its haphazard decision-making — were the real problem.

Regardless, the plan to surprise people, create momentum in the first week and hope the polls began to narrow did not succeed. “We’re going to lose badly,” one minister predicted, within days of the poll being called.

Self-selected mistakes

One of the first tasks in Conservative campaign headquarters was to urgently find candidates for key seats being vacated by retiring Tories.

A selections committee was tasked with sifting applications of Conservatives wanting to become MPs, putting together three-person shortlists from which local associations would make a choice.

It was a tense and grueling task; one prone to creating enemies. There were competing priorities to balance. One episode in particular illustrated a wider malaise in Sunak’s operation.

Filing through the list of candidate-less seats, the committee reached Tunbridge Wells and the application from the celebrated broadcaster Iain Dale to be shortlisted for his hometown. Dale had failed multiple attempts to become an MP before giving up and starting his popular LBC Radio show in 2010.

Dale is respected in Conservative circles, in part for speaking his mind on air. But his insider status meant due diligence took a backseat. As the discussion was ongoing, members of the committee Googled Dale to scope obvious problems. The results triggered immediate concerns. There was a clip of him arguing on his show in 2023 that the Tories “don’t deserve to be in government” and another complaining in 2022 that he could not vote for the Tories.

The meeting descended into a row about whether Dale should be selected and risk causing more headaches for the Tories. One of those in the room was Forsyth, Sunak’s closest aide and best friend from school. He pushed for Dale to make the list, arguing it would show Conservative tribes coming back together after a long period of infighting.

In the end, Forsyth won out. He and Sunak had been best men at each other’s weddings — those present knew he spoke for the prime minister. (Forsyth didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.)

Dale announced on May 28 he would quit his LBC show to launch a bid to become the Tunbridge Wells candidate. “I am putting my hat in the ring again,” he beamed. The announcement made headlines around the U.K.

Less than 72 hours later, Dale’s hat was back out of the ring. The website Byline Times had revealed he told his own podcast in 2022 he had “never liked” Tunbridge Wells and “would happily live somewhere else.” It was a difficult message for a wannabe-MP to square with his voters.

Dale quickly decided to throw in the towel, arguing opponents would use the comments out of context and saying he “wasn’t willing to suffer death by a thousand cuts.”

One activist on the ground chalked the fiasco up to “Westminster insiders” picking one another as candidates. Crucially, some argued the debacle was symptomatic of a wider problem — of Sunak’s aides having too much faith in their own limited political nous.

Numerous other selection rows caused unwanted headaches for the Tories. There was anger about Downing Street aides like Will Tanner and Declan Lyons being put forward for plum seats. Members in Basildon and Billericay went to campaign in a neighboring area in protest after Conservative Party Chair Richard Holden was imposed on them as a candidate, without even a three-person shortlist. He struggled to mount a successful campaign and, in the end, clung to the seat by just 20 votes.

Labour had selection difficulties too, and a blazing row about the possible deselection of veteran left-winger Diane Abbott cost the party days of unwanted headlines. A protracted stand-off between Abbott and the leadership ensued, blowing up the Labour news grid for the best part of a week.

Frontbenchers sent out on the airwaves were given ever-changing lines to take across the course of a few hours as the top brass floundered. An aide to a Labour frontbencher described the row as a “total mess,” while others complained about the battle being fought at such a crucial moment in the public spotlight.

The difference was that for Labour, it was one of only two real unforced errors of the entire campaign. For the Tories, they just kept coming.

How to stage a comeback

The Conservatives had planned to open their campaign with a bang. In the opening days CCHQ sprayed out new policies to swamp the national conversation. They aimed to appeal to possible supporters of the populist right-wing Reform party and bolster the Tory claim that Labour had no plan. The hope was voters would start to question what the Labour message of “change” would actually mean in practice — and how much it might cost.

Internal hopes ranged from minimizing the scale of the loss to actually clinging on in government, despite polls pointing to a whopping defeat.

For its part Labour had to avoid making “bold but stupid” headline-grabbing announcements so as to maintain its polling lead, Mandelson said, and at all costs “not start making mistakes.”

Instead the opposition would flesh out its so-called “six missions” — ambitious ideals for government — attack the Conservative record, and stress the extent to which Starmer had changed the party after the disastrous Jeremy Corbyn era.

The operation, led by McSweeney, focused on targeting former Conservative voters who might switch to Labour — so-called “hero voters” — based on profiles drawn up by veteran Labour pollster Deborah Mattinson.

Those voters were split into two broad groups that were on the whole similar in terms of economic standing and small-c conservative views. But there was one big difference: their level of trust and engagement with politics.

Labour was ahead with the first, more engaged group, which was also more pro-state intervention. But the election campaign had to focus hard on the latter group, people who never watch the news and are notoriously difficult to reach. Connecting with those voters — while being careful not to damage support with others — was the central challenge.

“The strategy is to focus on their base, rather than ours,” said Josh Simons, a close Starmer adviser and former think tank chief who is now also a Labour MP.

Each side had successes and failures in those initial weeks. Labour staff in their Southwark HQ stood to clap and cheer the TV screens when Conservative Mark Logan defected. An attack and rebuttal team, led by long-standing aide Paul Ovenden and veteran Labour spinner Damian McBride, churned out stories against opponents based on intel from regional teams on the ground. Campaigners would get in touch with all manner of stories about candidates, ranging from offensive material being shared online and lewd behavior to swearing in public. The team would filter out and confirm the best stories, then farm them out to the press, landing more than 150 over the course of the campaign.

For their part, the Tories bounced Labour into ruling out VAT rises after the election, the announcement being made via an embarrassing late-night email after a flurry of questions about Labour’s plans. It was seen inside CCHQ as a big win. The incumbents were dominating the overall conversation, their policies or attack lines leading front pages and news broadcasts — drowning out opponents’ messages, even if the coverage was not entirely positive.

Farage against the Conservative machine

But the Tory grip on the news narrative changed completely when Nigel Farage threw himself full pelt into the contest.

The Conservatives had been relieved when at the outset of the campaign, the former UKIP leader — instrumental to the vote for Brexit in 2016 — said he would sit out this election in order to help his pal Donald Trump’s U.S. Presidential bid.

Sunak had gambled on catching Farage’s Reform party on the hop, before it had the chance to mount a concerted campaign. At first the tactic appeared to work. But less than two weeks in, Farage dramatically changed his mind, announcing he would take over full leadership of Reform and stand for the seat of Clacton in Essex — his eighth attempt to become an MP.

Crestfallen CCHQ staff watched on TV as Farage made a big show of his gambit in a central London conference hall, gleefully fighting Trump-like with reporters who asked questions he didn’t like.

Once the press conference was over Farage roved around the hall, a gaggle of journalists in tow, conducting impromptu interviews for at least an hour while the room was being packed down. His long-suffering press aide Gawain Towler — who only learned about Farage’s intentions at 10 a.m. that morning — handed his boss a glass of wine, not his first of the event. Farage held it carefully out of camera shot, erupting on occasion into his rasping laugh at interview questions then berating the reporters in his next breath.

Broadcasters were agog at Farage’s dramatic intervention, which promised to derail the Conservative campaign further, and which coincided — bleakly for CCHQ — with a major new mega-poll forecasting devastating results for Sunak.

The entrance of Farage into the race sparked fresh recriminations among Conservative candidates, who argued the prime minister should have waited until the autumn when Farage might be more engrossed in the Trump campaign. “We were hoping to catch Reform off guard, but it was a bit of an own goal,” said a senior activist.

Despite the setback, the Tories received a real boost that same evening. In the first TV head-to-head debate between Sunak and Starmer, the prime minister peppered his opponent with claims households would see £2,000 tax rises under Labour. Even Labour aides admitted Starmer was too slow to counter the attacks.

The Tories couldn’t believe their luck when it took until the following morning for Labour to produce a letter from senior civil servant James Bowler, sent before the debate, condemning the Conservatives for claiming impartial officials had produced the math. Starmer had somehow been allowed to head into the debate without the letter in his back pocket. It was Labour’s second — but final — own goal of the campaign.

The row generated endless coverage, pleasing Team Sunak by keeping the conversation on its terms. The Domino’s pizzas delivered to CCHQ that night tasted better than those munched in Southwark. In retrospect, it marked the high point for the Tory campaign.

The lowest was just around the corner.

‘He left them on the beaches’

The PM’s trip to Normandy to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings had been planned long before the election was called. Downing Street had decided he would be there for the initial events with veterans, but would return home rather than attend a global leaders’ lunch the following day. It later emerged he did a campaign interview on his return.

The problem was that none of Sunak’s closest aides spotted the problem.

Senior figures in CCHQ insist this schedule was planned way ahead of time, before it was clear numerous world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, would be there. Their assumption was that sending a British representative in place of the prime minister would suffice. They say that by the time more details about the event emerged, the election had been called — contributing to a communication breakdown between government officials and the campaign.

But a fuming civil servant insisted the move was a “political decision” and said Sunak aides should have clocked the risk. Even some of those same top aides agree someone should have spotted the political danger of returning early. But nobody did. “The mistake was the [original] decision not being undone,” said one.

After Sunak had left France, Reuters photographer Benoit Tessier took a now-notorious picture featuring Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Sholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and David Cameron, looking statesman like together on the Omaha Beach, where thousands of Allied soldiers saw ferocious battle eight decades before.

“It was that photo that hurt,” said a senior Sunak campaign official.

To make matters worse, Starmer had also gone to France and had the foresight to remain — ending up photographed with numerous leaders, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. When one Labour aide saw the picture he did a chef’s kiss gesture. It was Starmer who already looked the statesman. The photo made it into the Labour manifesto.

Within hours of Sunak returning to Britain all hell broke loose. Farage went on the attack, as did Labour overnight. Conservatives were fuming, with one former minister branding the decision to leave the event early “fucking nuts.”

At their 5.40 a.m. daily call, aides weren’t sure how to handle the mess. An apology was mooted but there was a feeling Sunak had done nothing wrong, since he was at all the veteran-facing events.

A decision was finally taken to apologize in the hope of killing the row and drawing a line under the matter. Numerous candidates and activists thought the furor was a storm in a teacup and would blow over. But the apology only fanned the flames.

Endless frenzied coverage ensued, with opponents lashing the prime minister repeatedly for his decision. A D-Day veteran appeared on TV saying Sunak had let Britain down. The prime minister faced a grueling interview looking exhausted and forlorn. Farage and other political leaders mauled Sunak during a prime time TV debate. Ministers were forced to insist Sunak wasn’t going to quit mid-campaign. A former Conservative aide said it was “horrible” watching the saga develop from inside the campaign.

The one trump card Sunak still had in his pocket was looking prime ministerial, the person noted. But ditching fellow world leaders at a historic event and calling the election in the rain had trashed that image.

Critics chalked it up as another example of Sunak listening to too tight a circle of aides who don’t spot political risks, and a prime minister always assuming he knows best. It was made clear in private briefings to the press that Cameron had advised Sunak against leaving early, but to no avail.

Tech bro management

This self-confidence of Sunak’s inner sanctum was seen from the outside as a dangerous habit. A number of Sunak’s closest aides had been with him since he was chancellor and stuck with him through thick and thin.

The group plotted how best to position for the leadership ahead of Johnson falling, fought Truss in the subsequent contest, and then once in Downing Street battled against the factionalism among Conservative MPs that had festered since Brexit.

Some felt the group was paranoid about leaks after years of endless Conservative plotting during the Theresa May and Johnson eras, meaning decisions were often taken in too tight a loop. “There’s a real trust circle among them that’s been cultivated since Boris,” one former special adviser said. “It’s hard to shake that off.”

Certainly the group was rarely interested in outside advice. One example cited by colleagues came the weekend before Sunak called the election.

Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons and a former Conservative leadership contender, went to see the PM in Downing Street. She had been a staffer in CCHQ for two general elections and was preparing to fight her sixth as a candidate. She had also worked for the George Bush campaign in the U.S. in 2000 and retains experienced Republican contacts in Washington.

In No. 10 that weekend, Mordaunt offered Sunak to draw on those contacts for the upcoming election — not realizing how imminent the vote would be.

She presented Sunak with a list of U.S. campaign professionals — some of whom had experience in the U.K. too — who were willing to make an immediate trip to help the Tories. The aides were reluctant to work on the upcoming Donald Trump campaign and so had time to spare. It had been agreed that just one call was needed for the troops to organize themselves on behalf of CCHQ.

Mordaunt argued Sunak’s existing team lacked election experience. “She told him that if he went into an election without good support, especially on communications, his reputation would never recover,” said a person with knowledge of the discussion. “She also said he owed it to everyone to mount the best campaign he could. To do that we would need some further help from seasoned campaign professionals.”

Sunak thanked Mordaunt for the offer. She never heard anything more about it.

Downing Street didn’t respond to a request for comment. Mordaunt went on to lose her Portsmouth North seat.

More broadly, critics complain that Sunak’s aides were blinded by what they perceived as their boss’s brilliance — and simply couldn’t understand people not sharing their view. The plan seemed to be to just keep pushing him out to the public, until the electorate finally realized his magic.

“I think it’s taken an election campaign to convince the people around him that he is not popular and that the presidential approach was a stupid idea,” said one Conservative adviser.

But it was far too late to change course.

Clattering off the rails

Once the Conservative campaign was rolling and the polls continued to worsen, key human resources began to dry up. Ministers who didn’t want to be tied to the campaign or who were desperately fighting to keep their seats refused to go onto the airwaves to make the case for Sunak.

Some special advisers still helping their former bosses began ignoring pleas for help from CCHQ. One minister complained about “a severe absence” of senior figures willing to do media. Numerous Cabinet faces didn’t appear on TV once. On at least one occasion a Cabinet minister pulled out of a full evening broadcast round with a couple of hours to go, a junior minister sent in their place.

It meant the national picture ended up locked in a presidential air war, the focus almost entirely on Sunak, just as MPs on the ground tried frantically to distance themselves from the prime minister and trumpet their personal records. More than one person said MPs didn’t want Sunak to visit their seats at all, in case it harmed their campaigns. The PM appeared on precious few Tory leaflets posted through people’s doors.

As things got worse, promised donations from significant backers stopped materializing. The campaign began shifting resources to safer areas. Soon Sunak was visiting seats once deemed untouchable by opposition parties.

Numerous candidates continued to insist it wasn’t as bad on the ground as the polls were suggesting. But views varied dramatically from town to town. Frequently, those switching away from the Tories delivered the most savage messages. One former Conservative voter told a canvasser: “Thanks for coming to talk to me, but I really would rather drink my own vomit than vote Conservative again.”

Labour was headed in the opposite direction, moving deeper into uncharted waters and canvassing in seats once deemed unwinnable. In some areas, organizers had nothing more than paid-for commercial demographic data to go on. These were streets where Labour activists had literally never knocked the doors.

All leaflets were scrutinized to ensure consistent Labour messaging. One candidate had a draft rejected multiple times because it didn’t contain a Union Jack. “Fucking everything has to have a fucking flag on it,” another said.

The spiral of doom

To compound Conservative issues, special advisers who had joined the campaign at the start were dropping out.

The election surprise led some to assume there must be a watertight plan to win, secret polling which showed a path to victory, rabbits to be pulled from hats. “But it became very evident very quickly that despite the slogan, there wasn’t really a clear plan. Or bold action,” one campaign staffer said.

A senior official praised the advisers who stuck out the battle to the end, despite the dire forecasts. Levido kept morale up with all-staff meetings at 5 p.m. where good work was praised. He awarded koala and kangaroo soft toys to people for special efforts. Ministers would come in and thank staff too. But motivation was low. Around two thirds into the campaign, the nightly dinner takeouts at CCHQ stopped arriving because so much food was being wasted. Not enough staff were sticking around late enough. Some still hadn’t been told why the election had even been called.

Labour staff, too, were stressed and tired — but anticipation of victory kept them fueled. Aides reminded each other of an old adage of Alastair Campbell, the ex-comms chief to former prime minister Tony Blair, about the importance of keeping hydrated and avoiding alcohol: “Yellow piss is losers’ piss,” he told them in a pep-talk a couple of months before the election.

But after the first weeks the good intentions started to break down. Aides began drinking after work to relieve the stress. At least one was caught eating cold pizza in the office for breakfast the morning after a TV debate.

Labour HQ also received visits from senior figures. After the manifesto was signed off on June 7, Starmer entered the office for the first time in a couple of weeks to a standing ovation. He made a speech thanking officials that lasted around 20 minutes, much of it about how emotional he found the D-Day trip to Normandy. It felt a little bizarre, and there were suspicions it was being filmed for later use.

At points some in Labour felt the Tories simply vacated the pitch. After Starmer launched his manifesto in Manchester, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones stayed an extra night at the famous Midland Hotel preparing for the inevitable Conservative onslaught. He had an enormous lever-arch file of details, with plans to hold an urgent press conference if a battle for the narrative needed to be fought. Labour aides were hauled into the office early the next morning to man the phones, assuming reporters would be calling in with tough Conservative attack lines.

But the assault never came. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Laura Trott called a press conference in Westminster, repeating the same Conservative claims about tax rises CCHQ had been pushing throughout the campaign. She smiled wildly as she listed the possible tax hikes Labour hadn’t ruled out. The Tories clipped it into a cheap-looking official election broadcast afterward. The attack barely created a ripple.

Labour insiders were astonished at the lack of engagement with the manifesto contents. “We were expecting at least for the Tories to challenge our spending assumptions,” Jones said. “I was expecting a wonky fight about forecasts.” No-one even spotted the three typos in the manifesto. The plan for an emergency Labour press conference was junked.

In truth, there wasn’t much of substance in the Labour document, and most of it had been heard long before. The Conservative manifesto, on the other hand, contained multiple retail policies about cutting taxes, and others appealing directly to possible Reform voters. But candidates complained it lacked a serious, big ticket idea, or an overarching vision for a fifth term in government. One campaign staffer branded it “the most boring suicide note in history.”

With the manifestos out, the rest of the campaign should have been three repetitive weeks of honing attacks and preparing final messages. But just as the Tories switched tack to warning against a Labour “supermajority,” a timebomb ticking underneath them was about to blow.

Placing a bad bet

The night before the Labour manifesto was released, the Guardian dropped an exclusive that would shake the Conservative campaign to its core.

Political Editor Pippa Crear, one of the best scoop-getters in Westminster who had helped topple Boris Johnson with her reporting about lockdown parties in Downing Street, revealed Tory MP Craig Williams had bet £100 on a July election — three days before the prime minister named the date.

Williams was a near-unknown MP outside his home seat of Montgomeryshire in Wales. But crucially, he was one of the few MPs inside the Sunak inner circle. He was a parliamentary aide to the prime minister — a crucial link between Sunak and his troops in the Commons, a man who spent his time waddling back and forth between Downing Street and the Palace of Westminster.

Williams admitted placing the bet and apologized. But he refused to confirm he was among the select few who knew the election date, and therefore had inside information when he put the cash down — a possible crime.

The Gambling Commission launched a probe into Williams — and all other large bets placed on the election date over a certain period.

Within minutes the scandal was all over the airwaves. Whatever grip the Conservatives still had on the news agenda evaporated. A number of candidates thought Williams was stupid, but believed the issue should remain a Westminster bubble matter. For a while it looked like it would all calm down. Instead, it exploded.

A week later the Met Police announced one of Sunak’s close protection officers had been arrested in connection with a bet. The following morning the BBC push-alerted news to its millions of app users that a Conservative candidate, Laura Saunders, and her husband Tony Lee, a CCHQ director of campaigns, were also facing Gambling Commission probes. Now the story went nuclear.

The Tories were forced to delete an ill-timed social media attack ad on Labour with a gambling theme. Lee took a leave of absence. A Cabinet minister said those involved were “fucking idiots” — but insisted the issue still wasn’t coming up on the doors.

When the weekend papers revealed yet another CCHQ official was being investigated the media became frenzied. All political interviewees were being asked about “Gamblegate” and whether they had ever placed bets on the election, or even elections long past.

Calls were growing for the Tories to dump the candidates caught up in the scandal, but Sunak resisted. He told a BBC audience Q&A he was “incredibly angry,” but was struggling to fight the narrative of characteristic Conservative corruption.

On June 25 — almost two weeks after the Guardian broke the scoop about Williams — the Tories finally withdrew support for the two candidates involved, insisting an internal Conservative probe had now concluded.

The scandal went down “like a cup of cold sick” in CCHQ, according to one aide. A black humor descended over the building, with staff making light of each new betting story. “A lot of voters will have been in ‘final straw’ mode beforehand,” one campaign staffer sighed.

The day before the final head-to-head TV debate on BBC1, Starmer suspended Labour candidate Kevin Craig immediately after being told he was facing a Gambling Commission investigation for a different type of bet — that he would not win his seat. The headline was unhelpful, but it also gave Starmer the ammunition to blast Sunak in the BBC TV showdown for not acting until he was “bullied” into it. He linked the scandal to past sagas about lockdown parties in Downing Street.

A senior Conservative campaign official insisted it had been difficult to act sooner because the Gambling Commission told the party not to risk prejudicing its investigations. But Starmer had shown a political decision could be taken regardless.

Placing the worst bet ever

In the final week of the campaign, Sunak had a public moment of introspection.

“There’s no point sitting there going ‘I wish someone had given me four aces’,” he told reporters on the road with his campaign, in reference to the mess his predecessors left. “You’ve got to play the cards you’re dealt.”

Senior Downing Street officials argue now that those cards were surefire losers.

In a sense some elements of the campaign were a success. The Tories drove much of the conversation with their messages about taxes, global threats and Labour winning a so-called “supermajority” — in part via social media scare ads shared far and wide.

But the litany of self-inflicted errors served as damaging reminders of previous episodes of Tory incompetence and scandal, and made those wider messages difficult to land. And in truth, a large proportion of the public simply wasn’t willing to listen. After almost a decade and a half in office, much of it chaotic, the tide was going out on the Tories.

Debate about the timing of the election was fierce long before it was called and will no doubt continue. Counterfactuals are impossible to prove. But Downing Street aides note that despite all the efforts to turn public opinion around since Sunak became prime minister, the polls only moved twice in the past two years: once dramatically, as the Truss budget wrought havoc, and again — less dramatically — during the election campaign. Calling it was the first event in the Sunak era that woke voters up — so without all the gaffes things might have been different.

Critics counter that it was ultimately all far too late regardless — that he bungled his messaging while in office and so wasted the chance to change the narrative after Truss. Numerous Tories argued the repeated switches over 18 months between Sunak the stabilizer, Sunak the “change” candidate, Sunak appealing to the soft right, then the hard right, cutting taxes after raising them to their highest levels, were too haphazard to convince voters he offered a fresh start.

“I can’t tell you the number of times they popped up out of nowhere and said: ‘I’ve got a new plan for you’,” said a former special adviser. “If you have a plan, stick to it.”

Regardless, once the election was called, few disagree that Sunak played a losing hand badly. After holding his cards too close to his chest, Sunak finally laid them on the table — only to torch each one in turn, setting himself ablaze in the process.

“The campaign has been dogged with bad luck,” one Cabinet minister said toward the end. “It was going to be difficult to begin with. But Rishi has made it worse.”

Rosa Prince, Esther Webber and Dan Bloom contributed reporting.

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