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Rishi Sunak’s carefully stage-managed campaign tour made its penultimate odyssey through England on Tuesday, as the UK prime minister presented a determined figure fighting to stave off electoral disaster.
The prime minister took his campaign from Nuneaton to Oxfordshire, via Luton at the crack of dawn, stopping to play cricket with a youth club, sort through fruit and veg at supermarkets and admire cows at a dairy farm.
Defying the dark cloud that has settled over the campaign in the past few weeks, Sunak’s battle bus was a buoyant bubble, sheltered from the dire electoral projections circulating in the world outside.
Recent multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) polls have continued to predict shattering results for the Conservatives.
The latest Survation poll released on Tuesday evening predicted the Tories would be reduced to just 64 seats in Westminster, with the Lib Dems a fraction behind on 61. Under this scenario, Labour would well surpass its 1997 landslide to take 484 seats, while Reform UK would capture seven.
Nevertheless, the prime minister struck a laid-back pose at a cricket ground in Nuneaton on Monday evening, chuckling while batting cricket balls launched at him by local teenagers. The symbolism of the photo-op was unlikely to have been lost on Sunak, who is eager to pitch himself as a man swinging for boundaries on election day.
The Midlands seat has totemic significance in British politics as a key bellwether — the party that triumphs in Nuneaton has also won nationally in every election but one since 1983.
Tuesday’s campaigning kicked off at 4am; it was a convenient demonstration of Sunak’s assiduousness at a time when Conservative HQ was attacking Sir Keir Starmer for saying he would clock off at 6pm on Fridays if he became prime minister.
Former special advisers, staffers and volunteers milling around Sunak described a buzz after a rocky few weeks. One said the energy in the final days was palpable, adding that the version of Sunak we were seeing was “perky PM”.
Still, others griped about the early start and long hours, noting that many of them had not been paid at all over the course of the six week campaign because they had to step down from their official government positions as advisers and because Tory headquarters lacked funds.
“It’s slave labour,” one of them joked, adding more seriously: “This is the time we could be looking for our next job”. Addiction to political action was propelling a lot of them forward, they added.
At a 4:30am pit-stop at a large Ocado sorting facility in Luton, Sunak observed high-tech robots zip around the warehouse at great speed with little discernible purpose — activity that conjured parallels with his own campaign.
Sunak stopped the bus, with its “Clear Plan, Bold Action, Secure Future” slogan and free coffee, in Beaconsfield to buy his press entourage McDonald’s breakfasts, which he diligently handed out along with goody bags of chocolates and sweets. The move was a final olive branch extended to a media pack that has relentlessly chronicled his faltering — and sometimes disastrous — campaign.
Sunak did not linger in this formerly staunchly Conservative seat that the Liberal Democrats are increasingly hopeful they can capture, but forged onwards to Banbury in Oxfordshire, another constituency that many polls suggest the Tories are poised to lose.
Here, Sunak posed for photos at a distribution centre, packing goods into boxes as the current MP for the seat, attorney-general Victoria Prentis, watched from the sidelines.
Sunak tested out a new refrain on a gathered crowd of employees, telling workers “I know some of you are hesitating”, and conceding that “not everything has been perfect” over his tenure as prime minister. But he warned: “Don’t sleepwalk into something you haven’t thought properly about . . . you can make sure there isn’t a Labour supermajority.”
Speaking to a huddle of reporters afterwards, Sunak refused multiple requests to reflect on the successes and failures of his premiership or the election campaign. He was unwilling to cast his mind’s eye further back than his 4am start, which he mentioned four times in 15 minutes.
Asked if he lamented the mess left to him by his predecessors Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, Sunak said: “You’ve got to just play the cards you’re dealt. No point sitting there saying you wish someone had given you four aces.”
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