Voices: If Rishi Sunak is going to lose, what should he do in the next nine months?
The main significance of this week’s by-elections, for a prime minister hoping for something to turn up, is that nothing turned up. The voters confirmed that the public mood as portrayed by the opinion polls is accurate: people intend to vote Labour; they want the Conservatives out; and a chunk of the core Tory vote has defected to Reform.
Rishi Sunak can try his hardest to minimise Tory losses but his chances of avoiding defeat at the general election now depend on a big and unexpected disruption to national life.
Which means that the working assumption is that that he has pencilled in for 14 November – although I still think it could be 12 December, exactly five years after the last.
