Why this is the strangest of the 11 general elections I have covered

In 1983, I was sitting in the front row when Labour bizarrely confirmed at a press conference during the general election that Michael Foot was still the leader of the party, and would lead it into the contest.

That was my first election after moving to the Westminster village. I never dreamt I would see a repeat of Foot’s humiliating moment. Yet it happened again this week, in what is the most bizarre campaign I have witnessed in the 11 general elections I have covered.

The Conservatives have been so disaster-prone that, like several cabinet ministers before him, Rishi Sunak himself had to confirm he would not be replaced before next month’s election after his catastrophic decision to miss part of the D-Day commemorations in Normandy. Sunak prolonged his agony: the ITV interview for which he returned early wasn’t screened for six days. There was another burst of damaging coverage when it did.

The Tory campaign got even stranger when Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, appealed to voters not to give Labour a "supermajority” and “unchecked power, able to do anything”. Remarkably, this came only a day after Sunak launched the Tory manifesto – so it was hardly a sign of confidence in the party’s prospects. The beleaguered Sunak insisted he was still fighting to win, but Shapps wasn’t off message and Jeremy Hunt echoed his warning.

The Tories were desperate to change tack quickly because postal votes were about to go out. As one former minister who is standing for re-election put it: “It’s the panic button. It’s about trying to get 200 MPs so Labour is denied 10 years in power.” Some Tories who hoped for 250 at the start of the campaign now tell me they fear the party will end up with 150. (At the last election in 2019, they won 365.) Some candidates have ditched the toxic Tory brand in their electioneering but implicitly conceding defeat will further depress the morale of Tory activists.

True, it’s good for democracy to have a strong opposition to hold the government to account. But there’s no guarantee the Tories will get the sympathy vote. The ploy is unlikely to work because of the raw anger among voters towards the government. We have seen flashes of it from the audience in the TV debates. A survey by Public First found that people are “relatively open to the concept of total electoral obliteration for the Conservatives”. Some 46 per cent agree the Tories “deserve to lose every seat they have”, including a quarter of their 2019 voters. Ouch.

Although some Labour candidates think the “supermajority” warning might claw back some votes, one Starmer ally told me: “People will vote on the basis of preference and personal interest, not on a theory about a majority.”

Everything had to go right for Sunak in this election. But almost everything has gone wrong since he announced it in the Downing Street rain. An omen? Astonishingly, the Tory machine seemed more surprised by the snap election than Labour.

I expected the poll gap to narrow but the Tories have gone backwards. Sunak underestimated Nigel Farage’s love of the limelight. (I predicted he would return to the front line.) Reform UK has now overtaken the Tories in a poll for the first time, as Tory HQ had feared.

The Tory gaffes kept on coming. Richard Holden, who as party chair would normally play a prominent media role, went missing in action on the airwaves this week to escape a repeat of a disastrous Sky News interview over the way he was imposed as the candidate in Basildon and Billericay on a shortlist of one.

When it seemed things could not get any worse for the Tories, it emerged that Craig Williams, Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary, had bet £100 the PM would call a July election three days before he did.

Williams has apologised. If his actions had been in a draft script for The Thick of It, it would have been edited out as too incredible.

Is this the worst campaign I have seen? Probably – though it will depend on the rest of it and the result.

Labour’s effort was poor in 1983 and Margaret Thatcher won a majority of 144. Another omen, perhaps? The Tories lurched so far to the right under William Hague, they were off the pitch in 2001 – a warning that today’s Tories will probably ignore after their coming defeat. Theresa May’s campaign in her 2017 snap election deserves a dishonourable mention. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 campaign got the result it deserved after an implausible wish list of policies.

The answer to the essay question is: yes – governments normally lose elections and oppositions don’t win them. In this bizarre contest, the governing party is running ads pleading with voters to make them the opposition, rather than relegate them to third place behind the Liberal Democrats.

You couldn’t make it up – but somehow, the Tories have.