The 'Omnidirectional Crisis Hydra' That Led Rishi to Go For an Early Election

Russell Jones, author of 'The Decade in Tory' and 'Four Chancellors and a Funeral', investigates what caused Downing Street's 'Man with a Plan' to call a General Election without any actual plan

The Conservative Party spent a happy Wednesday morning boosting public confidence by ordering us to stock up homes that don't exist, with tinned food we can't afford, and water we daren’t drink, in preparation for whatever disaster they have planned next.

Much to their surprise, the next disaster will be exclusive to Conservative MPs, and on Wednesday afternoon, Rishi Sunak announced it would arrive on July 4th.

Don’t get your hopes up: he’s missed every other deadline he’s set.

As election announcements go, it wasn’t half bad. It was three-quarters bad. Some suggest Sunak's decision to launch a campaign without any sort of plan – or even any candidates in over 150 seats – disguises a politically masterful 4D chess move. His track record suggests otherwise. He didn't even have the wit to stay in out of the rain, perhaps by using the multimillion-pound Prime Ministerial briefing room Darth Bagpuss had insisted on building. No, Sunak had to go outside to get cinematically drenched as he performed his climactic big number.

‘I'm just Rish’, he sang, the only Ken in history to be smaller than his own action figurine. Prime Ministers aspire to grow into the job. Sunak appears to have shrunk into his, an effect not helped by the sound of protesters off-camera, backing his performance with a tinny rendition of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.

Number 10’s polling gurus have clearly concluded the opposite and decided to jump before they’re swallowed by the omnidirectional crisis hydra they’ve created. Hence an election before the summer proves that small boats have not stopped, and the winter proves that NHS waiting lists have not shrunk. Nothing is going well, as you can see from the now-forgotten news from the first half of the week.

Chris Philp, a shaved Afghan hound who’s been trained to do impressions of a policing minister, beamingly revealed that prisoners wouldn’t, after all, be released 70 days early due to the chronic overcrowding his party has overseen. In fact, it would only be 18 days. That's assuming the prisoners hadn't already broken through the walls of our crumbling prisons using plastic cutlery.

While Philp was shuffling convicts out of the back door, the Government's emotional support turbot, Michael Gove, was planning to shove thousands more in through the front. The free speech absolutist’s latest wheeze: singling out protests he doesn’t like and forcing them to pay the police to break up their own marches. Gove’s efforts are wasted. It’s impossible to turn us into a police state given the state of our police. Mass jailings and mass releases remain theoretical in a land where flat broke police forces have given orders to avoid doing anything that might result in mass arrests.

After 14 years of public underinvestment and private wealth-extraction, nothing works. The public longs for a reckoning. The Tories can only offer a wreckening, and the signs of it are everywhere.

None of us expect the Conservatives to fix the NHS, or improve the economy, or bring the long, meandering snipe-hunt for Brexit benefits to a successful conclusion. Unsurprisingly, even Sunak’s guarantee to pointlessly spend £200 million to send a handful of Albanians to Rwanda before the election has been dropped too.

All of this has been terrible for the country, but wonderful for the Tory leadership hopefuls lining up to chair meetings of their remaining MPs in a phone booth. Top patriot Robert Jenrick is making manoeuvres with the mystery backing of foreign hedge fund owners. Johnny Mercer is writing top-secret memos that are visible to anybody on the train, in which he advises Sunak to step aside so Cap’n Penny Mordaunt can be on the bridge when the ship goes down.

Meanwhile Suella Braverman’s strategy is to combine court rulings suggesting she acted unlawfully as Home Secretary with a supposedly stealthy public awareness campaign that’s only one step short of following Telegraph readers home and screaming her name through their letterbox.

The whole party has turned into a mad carousel, spinning circular lies as they jockey for position. Just a load of old pony ineffectually trying to bite the horse’s ass in front of it.

It's almost impossible to imagine a worse set of people to sit on a front bench, until you check out the backbench alternatives. Few of us shed a tear when the Butcher of Tehran came to a sticky end, but Michael Fabricant didn’t even wait for confirmation of his death before tweeting ‘We can only hope. (For the worst)’. Fabricant has three enemies in life: international diplomacy, Toni and Guy.

A few years ago I shared a flat with an African pygmy hedgehog named Flora, a pointless pet with a short lifespan, whose defining characteristic was that she’d only shit while running on her wheel. Round and round she would go, getting nowhere, knee-deep in her own manure, flinging it across my home in great stinking arcs every single day, until it was time for her to elaborately and expensively die.

And the only difference between Flora and Rishi Sunak’s party is that the hedgehog had all her pricks on the outside.

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Russell Jones is the author of two books, The Decade in Tory, and most recently, Four Chancellors and a Funeral. His forthcoming book Tories: The End of an Error, the final volume in the ‘Torygeddon’ Trilogy, is currently crowdfunding on Unbound. His legendary #The Week in Tory threads can be found @RussInCheshire on X/Twitter