Keir Starmer will be leader of the Labour Party and Rishi Sunak will be leader of the Conservative Party in the election. File photo – Reuters
Rishi Sunak has travelled thousands of miles in recent weeks but has failed to surpass expectations as his term as UK chancellor draws to a close.
British voters will cast their vote on Thursday in a general election that will pass judgment on Sunak’s 20-month tenure and the four Conservative prime ministers who came before him. Voters are widely expected to do something they haven’t done since 2005: elect a Labour government.
Mr Sunak spent the final two days of the campaign busy, visiting food warehouses, supermarkets and farms, but insisted “the outcome of this election is not a foregone conclusion”.
He said Wednesday that whatever the outcome, his “conscience is clear.”
“As long as I can look in the mirror and know that I’m working as hard as I can and doing what I believe is right for the country, I can get through and that’s what I believe I’m doing,” Sunak said.
But a last-minute pep talk at a Conservative party meeting on Tuesday night from former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who led the party to a landslide victory in the 2019 general election, did little to lift mood within the party. Conservative cabinet minister Mel Stride said on Wednesday that Labour looked headed for an “unprecedented landslide victory”.
Opinion polls suggest the centre-left Labour Party is set to win a landslide victory in Thursday’s vote, ending 14 years of Conservative rule, with Starmer set to be handed the keys to Downing Street on Friday morning.
Both Starmer and Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak warned voters in the final days of campaigning about the dire economic consequences if their opponent won, but with the result expected to be the worst in the party’s history, they said the Conservatives needed to shift their focus to limiting the damage and securing enough seats to give them a meaningful challenge to a Labour government.
“I accept entirely that the polls right now show that Labour is likely to win its biggest landslide victory ever, the biggest majority ever in this country,” Conservative minister Mel Stride told the BBC.
“So the key now is what kind of opposition do we have, do we have the capacity within Parliament to scrutinise the government,” Mr Sunak told ITV when asked about Mr Stride’s comments. “I’m fighting hard for every vote.”
According to Survation polling analysis, Labour is predicted to win 484 of the 650 seats in Parliament, the most in its history and far surpassing the 418 seats won by former leader Tony Blair in his 1997 landslide victory.
The Conservatives were predicted to win just 64 seats, the fewest they have won since the party was founded in 1834. Other analyses have suggested Labour’s margin of victory would be smaller, but no evidence has suggested the overall result would be different. Labour’s final campaign to call for the vote focused on concerns that voters would view the result as a foregone conclusion and not turn out to the polls on Thursday, or cast protest votes for smaller parties.
Starmer said Stride’s comments were an attempt to lure undecided voters away from casting their ballot after polls open at 6am GMT. “I would say if you want change you have to vote. I want people to be part of the change. I know there are very close constituencies across the country,” he told the BBC.
“I don’t take anything for granted, I respect my voters, I know we have to get every vote by 10pm tomorrow and we will do that.” Starmer’s campaign has been built around the one-word promise of “change”, tapping into dissatisfaction with the status quo in Britain’s strained public services and falling living standards, symptoms of a struggling economy and political unrest.
Sunak has sought to persuade voters that during his 20 months in power he has weathered external shocks such as the coronavirus pandemic and the Ukraine war, put the economy on an upward trajectory and brought an end to years of chaos under his Conservative predecessors.
Sunak said Starmer will be forced to raise taxes to implement his reform agenda and that the bigger Labour’s victory, the more Starmer will be willing to raise taxes beyond those already outlined. Opinion polls showed Labour leading by around 20 points but Sunak was unable to close the gap and so he turned to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom he helped oust from office in 2022, asking him to address the Conservative party conference late on Tuesday night.
Johnson, one of the best-known figures in British politics and the man who led his party to a landslide victory in 2019, made his first public appearance of the campaign in a speech in which he listed a long list of his achievements and offered a bit of a personal endorsement of Sunak. “None of us can sit idly by while a Labour government prepares, by its overwhelming majority, to destroy much of what we have achieved,” Johnson said.
With input from the agency.
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