So the PM just gets to decide the date of the election? Didn’t know that.
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Johnson scrapped the fixed term Parliament act, with Cameron had introduced, precisely to get back to the good old days of incumbent governments staging elections at a time of maximum benefit.
Sunak calling an election now, 20 points behind in the polls and having just been twatted in the local elections, suggests it’s going to be a miserable autumn.
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https://x.com/CountBinface/status/1793315264999608705?t=gGqZtZumXXaojbEVf_fdtA&s=19
Someone’s excited…
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Looks like some French farmers got lost whilst muck spreading!
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I don’t think they got lost.
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This seems right.
https://x.com/KateEMcCann/status/1793338591113785815
They know there are greater challenges on the way. At this point the public is done with them enough that even if they mounted an effective response they wont get credit anyway. So why stick around to do the hard work only to get grief for it when they could instead throw it at Labor’s feet and move on to the easier job of being in the opposition and painting the government as not managing a crisis well.
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Inflation is one of those weird political indicators. It captures something, but people don’t vote on inflation rates now, they vote on the inflation they perceive based on what they consume, when they consume it, and what baseline they are thinking against. It really shows up in American voter behaviour about gasoline prices. Gasoline prices can be stable, but high, and popular perception is that ‘inflation is out of control’. People are making their ‘calculations’ based on an expectation, often involving a previous case an incumbent can do almost nothing about.
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General question - do UK voters hate summer elections with the white-hot passion that Canadian voters do? Here, an early July election is seen as surefire political suicide, voters would simply want to punish whichever dickhead politician is responsible for forcing it. It may have cost Paul Martin what looked like a surefire majority in 2004.
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British summer? What’s that?
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Summer has been and gone already
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‘Things have started to go wrong.’
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It’s already clear what the Tories’ attack lines are. Pretty pathetic, unsurprisingly.
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The thinking is that people are generally happier in the summer than at other times of year and thus more likely to vote for the incumbent party.
Can’t see that happening this year though.
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‘Weaponised migration’, ‘environmental dogma’ and ‘Islamist extremism’… to quote soggy sunak
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It’s just raining here only a little warmer.
This one is even more entertaining:
https://x.com/Peston/status/1793315935689834605
To be honest though, I find he looks more like a human being without an umbrella in a drizzle. More authentic, less just a suit with a mouth plastered on. But I admit that I am not most people and standing in the rain with that music blearing seems like a rather grim omen for the Tories 
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haha this is now Drowning Street
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I can’t believe that there was discussion on the BBC and elsewhere yesterday about how the fact that it was raining when Sunak delivered his speech was not helpful to the Conservatives. Apparently, the “optics” weren’t right, and voters would be turned off by the memory of the bedraggled prime minister at voting time.
Imagine being so thick that you agree with all a party’s policies but don’t vote for them because it was raining one day.
Then again, people are fuckwits.
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I think for many this upcoming election will be just that.
Nothing to get over optimistic about with the other mob in charge, but have to get these disastrous tories out
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