Rishi Sunak last month stunned journalists, opposition parties, and the general public, not to mention his own MPs and Cabinet colleagues, when he announced a snap general election, which had been widely expected to take place no earlier than the autumn and possibly even as late as early 2025.

This was, to say the least, a surprising move from the leader of a party languishing 21 percentage points behind Keir Starmer's Labour in the most recent polls.

What - many wondered - could have possibly prompted this eccentric gambit?

The most obvious answer would be the positive economic figures published that morning. This was the news that inflationary pressures, which had run out of control for more than a year and had provoked what became known as a national cost-of-living crisis, had now been brought close to the government’s target figure of two percent.

Numerous other explanations were offered by the pundits. For one thing, Mr. Sunak had at last got parliament to approve his controversial plan to deport asylum-seekers to Central Africa, which established a clear blue line between the Conservatives and Labour – but he didn’t particularly want to wait to see its uncertain impacts on the numbers of people attempting the hazardous small-boat journey across the English Channel being tested this summer.

For another, he was increasingly looking like a lame-duck leader, with his plans to scrap international students’ post-study visas scuppered by a backlash from senior Conservatives and the right-wing press just that week.

It was also pointed out that the Tories' election coffers were now full and that he didn’t really want to give Labour the chance to boost its own war chest with the support of optimistic donors buoyed up through the heady days of September’s conference season.

But the true reason may have been something rather simpler. Rishi Sunak has always stood in the shadow of his predecessor Boris Johnson, the man who put him in charge of the British Treasury and whose downfall his high-profile resignation secured.

Johnson is of course a notorious risk-taker. Sunak is known for considering and calculating every strategy to death. He’s famed for his stultifying love of spreadsheets. In essence, he lacks the bombastic glamour of the blond buffoon.

He clearly doesn’t want to suffer the ignominious defeats of John Major in 1997 and Gordon Brown in 2010, dull thoughtful premiers whose electoral fates were sealed by their decisions to hold out until the last possible moment to go to the polls.

But, even more so, Rishi Sunak wants to outshine the man he’s often seen as having betrayed – and, for once in his political career, to do something unpredictable, visceral, and dramatic.

Well, his announcement itself was certainly dramatic but not perhaps in the way he’d hoped.

Rather than using the Downing Street press briefing room or employing a lackey with an umbrella, Mr. Sunak stood outside the door of Number Ten getting soaked in the pouring rain.

His suit was dripping and looked like it had been ruined, though his carefully coiffured hair seemed incongruously unaffected by the drenching.

In the background, as he struggled to make his historic address, the sound of the nineties pop hit ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ (the anthem of Tony Blair’s landslide victory which swept the Tories out of power for thirteen years) proved an effective enough act of sabotage.

He’d doubtless hoped to embody big bad Boris’ boldness, charisma, and spirit of risk, but, as it turned out, this truly was the epitome of what Margaret Thatcher’s supporters once used to call a ‘Tory wet’.

As his campaign got on the road, he rather desperately insisted that his leadership style was exemplified by “bold action” – but this was hardly something a bold man of action would be likely to need to say.

Indeed, he made the ineffectual oratory of his main opponent, Sir Keir Starmer, the wettest of wet blankets, sound like it held the rhetorical passion, strength of character, and moral authority of an Abraham Lincoln or a Martin Luther King.

It felt like the optics couldn’t get much worse. And then they did – when, two days later, the Prime Minister’s team sent him to Northern Ireland, where he visited the quarter of Belfast named after the most famous ship built there.

That ship was the Titanic. There’s a reason why it’s famous, but Mr. Sunak would probably want us to believe that the first four days of its maiden voyage went remarkably well.

He must surely have had a sinking feeling when he saw his itinerary. Things were not going swimmingly. Things could only get wetter.

The following day, the senior Conservative and Cabinet stalwart Michael Gove announced that he wouldn’t be standing at the election. The Tory’s campaign boat was certainly, as the Daily Express said, “rocked” by the minister’s decision – in the words of the Daily Mirror – to “quit Sunak’s sinking ship”.

Yes, things appeared to have become wetter than, as they say, a wet weekend in Wigan; which is pretty wet indeed.

But by the first weekend of the campaign, the leaders of the two main parties had spelled out their big new ideas – properly radical proposals designed to appeal to their key demographics.

Labour would reduce the voting age from 18 to 16. The Conservatives would bring back mandatory national service for the first time since 1960, making all 18-year-olds either serve a year in the armed forces or commit to a weekend of community work every month for a year.

There are those who’d say that sounds like a bit of a no-brainer – the choice between a year of grueling military training and potentially fatal action, or 24 days helping out the old ladies in your local charity shop.

But it was clearly meant to please those elderly Tory supporters who consider anyone under the age of 40 almost certain to be a junkie hooligan or a woke snowflake and (either way) to pose a very real threat to suburban civilization – just as Keir Starmer’s shamelessly self-serving plan to lower the voting age was calculated to enlarge a generation of young left-leaning voters.

It's unclear though how many of those 18-year-olds who’ll be able to cast their ballots in the first week of July will hold very strong beliefs as to whether people two years younger than them should also have the right to vote, or indeed whether serving members of the armed forces and veterans would agree that the British military might benefit from being flooded with the dregs of the nation’s disaffected youth.

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To those who’d be affected by this plan, the imposition of community service (a common enough sentence for minor felonies) might well seem like a punishment, as though it were a crime to be young. And with the nation’s prisons already bursting at the seams, it’s uncertain what sanctions might be imposed upon young people who refuse to comply with this compulsory indenture.

It was then reported that having discounted the possibility of jailing thousands of young people for non-compliance, Mr. Sunak was considering banning them from future employment opportunities in the public sector. It was an unusual idea to float to a nation desperate to recruit people into teaching, emergency services, and healthcare.

This plan to introduce a program of indiscriminate penal servitude hardly smacks of the libertarian values so often claimed by the Conservatives.

Five days into the campaign, one of the record 80 or so Tory MPs who’d announced that they were quitting their parliamentary careers – a case of jumping before they were pushed – was suspended from the party after declaring her support for the candidate for the rival Reform UK in the seat she was vacating. By this point, it felt that Mr. Sunak had lost control not only of the political narrative but also of his own people.

Indeed, it appeared that having little hope of reclaiming the ideological center ground from Labour, the Tories were now just desperate – in their plans to consign Britain’s youth to boot camp – to stop the nationalistic Reform UK stealing too many of their votes.

Reform was after all the party described on the campaign trail by its then honorary president Nigel Farage as representing “the new Conservative movement."

The Tories’ response was to lurch further to the populist right and to announce that they would scrap what they called “rip-off” university degrees and replace them with more practical apprenticeships.

While they continued to restrict the range of opportunities available for young people, they pledged to secure rates of pensions for the elderly. It was increasingly clear where their demographic priorities lay.

Opinion polls have after all shown that 18-year-olds are nearly ten times more likely to vote Labour than Conservative.

The National Union of Students responded that “the Conservatives’ only offer to young people seems to be conscription and course cuts."

Just a week into the campaign, the police investigation into the tax affairs of Labour’s deputy leader – an investigation originally demanded by a senior Tory – was called off. By now Mr. Sunak would have looked the least effectual, most ludicrous, and wettest man in British politics, were it not for the fact that on the same day, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, while attempting an ill-advised publicity stunt, fell off a paddleboard five times into a lake.

Wet, wet, wet.

Then, during the second week of his remorseless campaign trail, the beleaguered Prime Minister happened to drop into the area, in which I myself live, to enjoy a bag of chips – or at least to be photographed holding a bag of chips.

It wasn’t the most stylish look and hardly complemented the £750 monogrammed backpack he’d acquired for the occasion – as he toured one of the more economically deprived parts of the country.

In a further PR misstep typical of his campaign so far, he was mocked by locals for having chosen to visit what’s generally considered to be the worst takeaway in town.

The next day, one of Mr. Sunak’s outgoing parliamentarians announced that he was backing Labour as the party which had succeeded in taking the center ground of British politics. This felt like yet another low point for the Tories. It turns out that there is after all something worse than a wet suit and bad chips.

But all was not yet lost for Rishi Sunak. Recent polls have shown that support for Reform UK had started to drift back to the Conservatives. If the Tories could maintain that momentum, they’d still have a chance of staying in office, even if that possibility might seem slimmer than the chance of a dry day in May on Downing Street.

Then just as it looked like things might turn around for the Tories a couple of things happened. One relatively minor misadventure was the news that one of their candidates was being investigated after appearing to suggest in his campaign material that his candidacy was endorsed by Labour and Reform UK.

Embarrassing certainly, but not fatal.

Then, at the start of last week, the Tories received what the BBC’s political editor described as “the kind of news nightmares are made of."

Nigel Farage – who a week earlier had ruled himself out of standing in the election – announced that he would stand after all… and that he was also taking over the leadership of Reform UK.

He might be the worst human being this side of Donald Trump, but he’s hugely popular with the right wing of the Conservative Party. And though his popularity tends to prove bad news for the country, it’s almost certainly even worse news for Rishi Sunak as he sees the traditional heartlands of his party’s supporters split in half.

The same day, a new opinion poll suggested that the Conservatives could lose nearly 60 percent of their seats in parliament.

The following morning, the Conservatives matched Mr. Farage’s promise to put a numerical cap on migration but refused to say what that number might be.

That day, the front page of the Daily Mirror predicted a Tory “meltdown” and the Daily Mail declared that this was Mr. Sunak’s “darkest hour”.

But don’t they say that it’s always darkest before the dawn? Couldn’t things only get better? Well, maybe. Or possibly, most probably, much, much worse.

But then, last Tuesday, came the first televised debate between the two main party leaders. Armed with some explosive (and highly questionable) claims as to the tax burden a Labour administration would impose, the Prime Minister came out fighting. The Express called his performance “feisty” while the Mail called him “fiery”. The Times said he’d had Sir Keir Starmer “on the ropes."

An opinion poll showed that 51 percent of viewers felt that Mr. Sunak had won the debate. More importantly, it showed that 85 percent of traditionally Tory voters felt that he’d outperformed his opponent.

The BBC’s political editor supposed that Conservative supporters’ spirits would have been “lifted by their leader’s willingness to fight."

And so, with weeks more campaigning to endure, it’s become painfully clear that it won’t be over till it’s over. And that currently feels like an awfully long way away.