When rumours spread that Chancellor Rishi Sunak was about to call an early election, one Conservative cabinet minister was asked by a colleague what was going on. “I have no idea,” he replied. “He’ll either call an early election today, or he’ll name a date in the autumn, or he’ll tell everyone that AI is really, really important.”
Ministers, and most of the woefully ill-prepared Conservative Party officials, were kept in the dark until almost the last moment, and when Mr Sunak announced the result in Downing Street in the pouring rain, it was treated as a total fiasco among his colleagues.
“This will be a disaster,” shouted one senior Conservative minister to a Labour MP in a shocked and caught-off-guard moment, who lost his safe seat in Thursday’s election.
Days before the election was announced in May, he met with the Conservative campaign chief, Isaac Levid, and the strategist made it clear that holding an election in the summer would be the wrong move.
But Levido’s wishes were overturned, and friends subsequently reported the matter openly in the media. The day had been so unexpected that candidates had not yet been selected in 160 seats, and the party leader, Richard Haldane, was searching for constituencies where he could win.
The decision to go ahead in July was made by Mr Sunak and his core team – his chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith, his political secretary James Forsyth, his parliamentary aide Craig Williams and Claire Coutinho, the energy secretary and former adviser. Their theory was that they needed to call an election to get people’s attention because “no one is listening”. “We need to get undecided voters aware of us,” said a Downing Street source.
One strategy has been to abandon eye-catching policies such as bringing back the National Service and hope that voters will give them another chance, and look to a future led by Mr Sunak rather than a past tainted by Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.
Unfortunately, it only caught the Conservatives off guard. Despite long-standing tensions over strategy between Mr Sunak and Mr Levid dating back to last summer, this marked the beginning of a rift at the heart of the Conservative organising effort.
From the moment the election campaign began, Levido took over as campaign manager and was in charge of the overall election campaign, while Booth-Smith handed over authority to him and focused on speeches and storytelling.
The team sat in an open-plan office in Matthew Parker Street, Westminster, flanked by Mr Levido, external staff, senior party figures and the snack-folk from Number 10. The motivational election song, the Elvis-vs-J.L. Stewart-Crosby version of “A Little Less Conversation,” was blasted at intervals throughout the day, and “Koala” awards were handed out to hard-working people by Mr Levido, an Australian and former protégé of Lynton Crosby.
Conservative sources say that from the beginning there was blame within Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) towards aides from No 10 who had joined the office and decided the timing, and that there were few senior politicians in CCHQ and the campaign was “essentially run by spokesmen”. [special advisers]Instead of volunteering in a hopeless election campaign, some chose to re-enter the job market, leaving only their most ardent supporters.
Some insiders say CCHQ officials and No. 10’s Snakits did not work well as a cohesive team, but one No. 10 source disputed this, saying Levido would have liked more time to prepare, but acknowledged that the campaign ran cohesively as a “really professional unit”.
Few Conservative candidates seem to blame Levid for his campaign, believing he is doing the best he can given Sunak’s low approval ratings, the domestic mood of reform, the absence of ministers (who have had to campaign to protect their own seats) and Truss’ embarrassing legacy.
But it was Mr. Levid who pushed the idea that the Conservatives needed to win over reform-leaning voters, rather than leaning to the center where they are traditionally elected. One senior Conservative said Mr. Levid told him that people who had left the Conservatives for Labour were “gone and never coming back,” and the party needed to focus on reform-leaning right-wing voters. This strategy might have worked when Mr. Farage was out of the race. But the right’s return as a reformist leader emboldened former Conservative supporters to choose Mr. Sunak’s staunch anti-immigration policies rather than a pale imitation of his.
Mr Sunak himself was a solitary figure throughout the campaign, working without a united front of ministers around him and many of his key aides by his side – in stark contrast to Keir Starmer, who travelled with a retinue of senior aides.
The prime minister had Zoom calls with key aides throughout the day, starting with the first at about 5:30 a.m. But only a small team was in attendance, including a more junior aide helping to organize events and his head of operations, Lisa Lovering, and sometimes with Forsyth, a friend who was best man in his wedding and will become his political secretary in 2022.
Big names like Michael Gove, James Cleverley and Jeremy Hunt remained firmly in the background. Oliver Dowden, a close aide to the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, looked “disenfranchised and depressed”, according to one person who spent time with him.
“It’s unforgivable that they called an election campaign before CCHQ was ready,” one Conservative source said. “The second problem was on the manifesto front… They basically had the wrong kind of boldness. They turned it up to 11 on issues like compulsory national service and they didn’t have any good tax proposals.”
Mr Sunak and some of his advisers are to blame for the disastrous decision to return Senator Normandy from the Senate Armed Services Committee early, a decision that infuriated the public.
And the decision worked in Farage’s favour, as senior Conservative leaders urged Sunak to seek reconciliation and some kind of understanding with the Reform Party leader, as Johnson managed to do in 2019.
Farage, the far-right politician, hinted at the idea in an interview with The Sun, but Sunak firmly denied it. Farage quickly retracted the offer to meet, instead sensing an opportunity to return to parliament by standing for office.
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The revelation that Mr Sunak’s aide Craig Williams had bet on the timing of the election was not directly his fault, but it raised questions about the Prime Minister’s political judgement in not realising the danger of ending the scandal by cutting ties with Mr Sunak immediately after it was exposed by the Guardian.
CCHQ officials said Mr Levido had kept a cool head during these tumultuous times. “He just refused to dwell on things, said it had happened and things had to get moving,” one campaign official said.
Mr Sunak himself had moments of frustration and despair during the campaign, including over D-Day and the gambling scandal, and on a number of occasions after getting into difficult situations he would walk away from reporters’ meetings without even a chat.
“Everyone was in at the crack of dawn, working hard, but all the announcers wanted to talk about was the polls. The first four questions in the interview were all about the polls. Every day a new poll showed we were 25 points behind,” said a No 10 adviser.
In the final week, as the Prime Minister and his advisers seemed to accept the result, he occasionally appeared cheerful – he flashed a beaming smile at 4am while touring an Ocado warehouse in Bedfordshire, even as he crisscrossed the Home Counties to visit a majority constituency of more than 20,000 people, one that no previous leader has had to defend.
His upbeat mood was not shared by many of the candidates, who ranged from broken to infuriated, with one senior Conservative blasting, two days before the polls, that he was running “the worst election of his life”, with neither money nor real support in close contested constituencies.
On election night, CCHQ insiders said there was a sense of relief that there was neither a Labor supermajority nor a Conservative collapse on the scale of Canada’s 1993 election, but also disappointment at the loss of more than 200 seats.
“It felt like there was still a foundation for a future bounce back. It wasn’t something that was going to take 25 years to recover from. People were more bullish on things at 10.30pm than they were at 9.30pm,” the adviser said. [10pm] The exit poll was the most positive in about five weeks.”
Mr Sunak himself was in his Yorkshire constituency for the results but travelled to London in the morning, where he addressed his CCHQ team at around 8am. “He gave a speech taking full responsibility. He said, ‘This is my fault, this is not any of your fault. You have all worked really hard and you should be very proud of what you have achieved’. He went around the room and thanked each person individually.”
Mr Sunak’s advisers argue the timing of the election would not have affected the outcome, with many people finishing their fixed-rate mortgage repayments and many more small boats likely to arrive over the summer.
Instead, they are tracing the election defeat back to Ms Truss’s time. In one reflective moment in the final week, the prime minister appeared to blame her predecessor, saying he could only “play the cards he was dealt” and that he had not been dealt four aces.
“Things took a sudden turn in October 2022. That was the defining moment. We did what we could to turn the situation around, but there’s only so much you can do once the hordes come over the walls,” one Downing Street aide said.
