TIME is almost up. It has been 43 days since Rishi Sunak stood out in the pissing rain in Downing Street and announced his decision to call a General Election.
Frankly the optics that day were terrible for Mr Sunak and the campaign has got little better for the Conservatives since then.
It is thought that the decision to go to the polls was made on the back of the announcement by the Office of National Statistics that inflation had finally almost dropped to the all-important 2% target.
But, after 14 years of often chaotic Conservative-led government, the opinion polls suggest the public is no longer in the mood to accept such tiny morsels.
Instead, most polling companies continue to show the same sort of significant Labour leads which began at the tail-end of the scandal-ridden Boris Johnson era in which Mr Sunak was Chancellor.
Moreover, for the first time since 2005, The Sun newspaper - known for wanting to back the winner - has endorsed Labour.
It is a far cry from December 2019 when Mr Johnson won a comfortable 80-seat majority on the back of his promise to get Brexit done.
Even, as recently as May 2021, Mr Johnson eyed "a decade in power", according to the Times, as the Conservatives basked in the success of roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine.
But then came Partygate. And the sale of contracts for personal protection equipment to Tory donors. And the Chris Pincher groping scandal - and so much more.
In the meantime, Labour had installed a leader in Sir Keir Starmer who was more palatable to Middle England than left-winger Jeremy Corbyn.
Next came the financial upheaval caused by the mini-Budget announced by Liz Truss's Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng during her 49-day tenure, the shortest on record for a Prime Minister.
Yet nothing which Mr Sunak has done since his own elevation on 25 October 2022 - which appears to have been very little - has even as much as threatened to turn the tide.
Indeed, the only noticeable shift in the polls during the election period has gone against the Conservatives following the re-entry of former UKIP and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage.
Mr Farage entered the election in typically dramatic style, taking over the leadership of the insurgent Reform Party from Richard Tice on 3 June and announcing his candidacy in the Clacton constituency.
Remarkably, it is the eighth time that Mr Farage has stood for election to the House of Commons - and he has failed to win on the previous seven occasions in 1994, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2010, and 2015.
But this time feels different - long-standing political pundits are struggling to remember a government quite as unpopular as the Sunak administration, and there is a likelihood that Reform will take a select few seats.
Ultimately, any greater impact by Reform will be stymied by the First Past The Post system - which a referendum held on 5 May 2011 agreed to keep in place over the Alternative Vote.
Instead, if the Labour vote is as efficient as suggested by some forecasts, a largely evenly-spread Reform vote across England and Wales would be likely to cause change in all sorts of Conservative seats which would not be considered, in all normality, to be marginal.
For sure, Mr Sunak appears to be running scared of this scenario and given up the fight, even going as far as to appeal to his followers on X/Twitter on the eve of the election to "stop the [Labour] supermajority".
It really was an astounding message for an incumbent Prime Minister to send out.
Of course, it is not just Labour and Reform which the Conservatives need to worry about, though.
The Liberal Democrats were massively hit by their association with the Tories in the austerity-driven coalition between 2010 and 2015.
But recent big-swing by-election and council election victories have shown Ed Davey's party has begun to recover ground in their traditional heartlands in the South West of England and the outskirts of London.
Some forecasts have even suggested that a particularly efficient spread of the Lib Dem vote in the south would turn Ed Davey's party into the Official Opposition and reduce the Conservatives to double figures in terms of seats.
That still seems fanciful - but what is not in doubt is the fact that the Tories are in big trouble.
Already it seems to have been generally accepted that the Conservatives are facing a 1997-style defeat when Labour under Tony Blair began three full terms of government with a stonking majority of 179.
Nevertheless, the prospect of the Conservative cohort being reduced to fewer than 100 MPs cannot be ruled out altogether.
In turn, that might signal the beginning of the end of its current guise as a political behemoth which has dominated British politics for huge stretches of time since its formation in 1834.
Certainly, Reform will be hoping to win enough seats to present itself as a legitimate offering on the political right - and, while fully-fledged political collapses are pretty rare, they are also not unprecedented.
In the 1993 federal election in Canada, the centre-right Progressive Conservatives had their outright majority reduced to two seats.
More recently, in the Presidential and legislative elections in France in 2017, it was the turn of the centre-left Parti Socialiste to fall away into insignificance.
Even in the UK itself, it is not a complete unknown - although it is 114 years since a badly-divided Liberal Party collapsed from power in 1910.
Neither that party nor any of its successors have ever come close to holding a majority again, though.
GENERAL ELECTION 2024 THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR
▪️ The exit poll
For people who are not complete political nerds intent on pulling an all-nighters, just staying up until 10pm - when the polls officially close - may well suffice given its improving accuracy. That will signal the release of the exit poll - a pooled effort by BBC, ITV and Sky in around 150 key constituencies - where voters are asked which candidate they voted for. The exit poll accurately assessed in 2017 that Theresa May had lost her majority and also that the Conservatives remained the largest party - while, in 2019, it pointed towards a Conservative majority of 86 under Boris Johnson which ended up being 80. In 2010, the exit poll was actually almost spot-on in predicting the number of seats won by each of the main parties as David Cameron fell short of a majority. And, even though in 2015 it failed to pick the Conservatives majority under Mr Cameron, it still correctly showed the Tories had won far more seats than the polls during the campaign had suggested.
▪️ Overall turnout
Turnout at General Elections hovvered between 70-80% for most of the 20th Century but, since the turn of the Millennium, it has dropped to 60-70%. In 2001, in an election dubbed Labour's "quiet landslide", turnout fell as low as 59.4% - although it has been at a rather heathlier 68.8% and 67.3% in the two most recent General Elections in 2017 and 2019. A lower turnout than usual this time could spell more trouble for the Conservatives if it is their disenchanted supporters who have declined the invitation to attend the ballot box.
▪️ New boundaries and notional majorities
The outgoing Parliament finally voted on the recommendations made by the Boundary Commission, meaning this General Election will be the first to be contested under the new boundaries. To the casual observer, it will mean for many voters that they will be voting in a constituency which has changed its name. More than that, though, the geography of the new seat will be, in some cases, significantly different to its predecessor - and that leads us onto notional majorities. A notional majority is a calculation made to determine what an election result would have been in a previous election if the newly-created boundaries had been in place then. Originally, the boundary changes were expected to benefit the Conservatives slightly more than the other parties as the Commission's findings account for population movement which is generally from the north to the south, where more Conservative support is based. Such has been the steepness of the decline in the popularity of the Tories, though, that - beyond a new set of seat names - the changes will have a negligible effect.
▪️ Big fish
It is something of a mark of the chaos of the previous Parliament that, between the elections of 2019 and 2024, there have been three Prime Ministers, five Chancellors of the Exchequer, four Home Secretaries, and four Foreign Secretaries in the four Great Offices of State, as shown below. Several of these figures are not standing for re-election while current Foreign Secretary David Cameron sits in the House of Lords. But might Liz Truss, Jeremy Hunt, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Grant Shapps, James Cleverly or even Rishi Sunak produce a moment to rival that of the deposition of Michael Portillo in 1997?
| Prime Minister | Chancellor | Home Secretary | Foreign Secretary |
| Boris Johnson (2019 to 06-Sep-2022) | Sajid Javid (2019 to 13-Feb-2020) Rishi Sunak (13-Feb-2020 to 05-Jul-2022) Nadhim Zahawi (05-Jul-2022 to 06-Sep-2022) | Priti Patel (2019 to 06-Sep-2022) | Dominic Raab (2019 to 15-Sep-2021) Liz Truss (15-Sep-2021 to 06-Sep-2022) |
| Liz Truss (06-Sep-2022 to 25-Oct-2022) | Kwasi Kwarteng (06-Sep-2022 to 14-Oct-2022) Jeremy Hunt (since 14-Oct-2022) | Suella Braverman (06-Sep-2022 to 19-Oct-2022) Grant Shapps (19-Oct-2022 to 25-Oct-2022) | James Cleverly (06-Sep-2022 to 13-Nov-2023) |
| Rishi Sunak (since 25-Oct-2022) | Suella Braverman (25-Oct-2022 to 13-Nov-2023) James Cleverly (since 13-Nov-2023) | Baron (David) Cameron (since 13-Nov-2023) | |
Labour won 418 seats under Tony Blair at the 1997 General Election for a majority of 179 - while the Conservatives under John Major were reduced to 165. The Tories had fared worse only in 1906, when they took only 131 seats - yet there is speculation, even among dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives, that one or more of these records could be broken.
▪️ Number of seats won by Liberal Democrats, Reform, and Green Party
The First Past The Post system encourages dominance by two parties by its very nature and makes it difficult for smaller parties to make much impact at a General Election. Over the years, the Lib Dems often punched above the weight of their overall vote by pouring their resources into select target seats - and the Green Party and Reform appear to be following suit. Mainly appealing to those on the left-wing who are disaffected by the centrist shift of the Labour leadership, the Greens have set their sights on Bristol Central, North Herefordshire and Waveney Valley, as well as holding Brighton Pavilion despite the retirement of four-term MP Caroline Lucas. Meanwhile, Reform will look to have attracted people disenchanted with politics generally - and, as well as holding Ashfield which the party gained in March 2024 as a result of the defection of Lee Anderson, leader Nigel Farage is aiming to make it into Parliament at the eighth time of asking as MP for Clacton. Other targets for Reform include Boston and Skegness, Basildon and Billericay and Great Yarmouth.
▪️ Number of seats won by the Scottish Nationalist Party
Up to this point, this preview has focused on seats in England and Wales - but the situation in Scotland is slightly different. There, Labour again appears to be benefiting from a collapse in support of a scandal-hit ruling party, except in this case that party is the Scottish Nationalists, and not the Conservatives. The SNP has been in power in the Scottish Parliament since 2007, and has won the most seats north of the border in the last three General Elections - but it faces the outcome of an ongoing investigation by Police Scotland into possible fundraising fraud. Prior to SNP surge, during the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown era, Scotland was a bedrock of Labour support - and polling suggests Sir Keir Starmer has begun to recover much of the lost ground in Central Belt. Still, in contrast to the so-called Red Wall in England and large parts of Wales which are expected to return fully to the Labour fold, the political outlook in Scotland looks set to be finely balanced - and the SNP will aim to limit their losses after a rough few years.
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