Is Rishi Sunak running the worst election campaign in history?

Everything that could go wrong for the prime minister has gone wrong, but leaving the D-Day commemorations early may be a blunder that goes down in the history books, says John Rentoul – and there are still four weeks of unenforced errors yet to come

Rishi Sunak’s minor mistakes have kept alive the narrative of a particularly gaffe-strewn campaign (PA)

Day one, 22 May: Rishi Sunak called the election in a rain-soaked speech from Downing Street. If it had been fiction, it would have been one of two things. Either, a portent of a disastrous campaign to come, or the prelude to the great fightback story of the underdog persevering against all odds.

It turns out it was a visual metaphor of a disastrous campaign to come.

The rain itself was hardly important, except as an excuse for jokes about how the prime minister has a plan, but it did not include checking the weather forecast. More significant was that holding the election four months earlier than expected caught his own party off guard more than it wrong-footed the opposition.

Conservative MPs complained that they were not ready, and a whole jumble sale of legislation that was going through parliament ended up in the skip – including measures that Sunak had solemnly promised would be passed before the summer recess.

The first few days featured minor mistakes that kept the narrative of a gaffe-strewn campaign going. On day two, Sunak asked brewery workers if they were looking forward to the football – in Wales, which is not in the Euros. He took questions from warehouse workers in Derbyshire, one of whom turned out to be a Conservative councillor in hi-vis.

On day three, he visited the Titanic Quarter in Belfast, prompting a journalist to ask: “Are you captaining a sinking ship?”

On day six, Conservative HQ sent out an email accusing Tory MPs of failing to pull their weight on the campaign trail – to the MPs that it named and shamed.

On day 13 – on Monday this week – the Tories put out a social media video of Sunak with a flipchart of Labour’s policies: a blank sheet of paper – which was immediately edited by Labour to show its six election pledges. By the time on Tuesday that the first Tory election broadcast featured the Union flag upside down, the Tory campaign was eclipsed by the return of Nigel Farage as leader of Reform UK and a parliamentary candidate.

Then, on Thursday, Sunak snubbed D-Day veterans and was accused of disrespecting the memory of the fallen by coming home early from Normandy.

It is hard to think of a more disastrous blunder in British general election history. Labour’s 1983 campaign was a shambles. It featured an emergency session of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in the middle of the campaign, which was followed by Jim Mortimer, the general secretary, announcing to journalists that the meeting had “unanimously agreed that Michael Foot is leader of the Labour Party”.

But Labour was in opposition, and no one (apart from me, a young Labour activist) expected Foot to win.

For its sheer tone-deafness, Rishi’s D-Day gaffe has echoes of Foot’s appearance at the Remembrance Sunday commemorations in 1981, when he was accused of laying a wreath at the Cenotaph while wearing a donkey jacket. The fact it was a mid-length woollen overcoat by Jaeger (Margaret Thatcher’s favourite label) and had been bought from Harrods by his wife, is now mostly lost in the rubble of the Conservatives’ 1983 election landslide.

John Major’s situation in 1997 was more like Sunak’s. His campaign went badly, but mostly not because of mistakes that Major himself had made. He was beset by the personal and financial wrongdoings of MPs, including Neil Hamilton, who fought on as a candidate despite being found to have taken cash to ask parliamentary questions. Major’s party was so divided on the issue of Europe that he scrapped the final election broadcast and instead issued a personal plea to camera to his candidates not to “bind my hands” in future negotiations over the single currency.

Tony Blair won by a landslide – but at least Major narrowed the gap in the opinion polls during the campaign from 22 points to 13.

However, the benchmark for disastrous election campaigns – the gold standard – is Theresa May’s campaign in 2017. She started with a huge opinion poll lead and managed to throw it away – against Jeremy Corbyn. Her biggest blunder was the manifesto, which included a policy instantly dubbed the dementia tax, which was essentially a plan to force the owners of modest homes to sell them to pay for their care.

It was a policy that had seemed sensible to wonks, but which blew up in contact with reality. Sunak’s blunder is a different kind of error: it reinforces the common view that he is out of touch, that he doesn’t understand the emotion of patriotism.

Its full awfulness has not yet unfolded, and the Tory campaign did already seem to be doomed. But leaving a memorial in Normandy early for a TV interview must be the worst blunder in a British election – ever.