What if Rishi Sunak had held the election today?

In theory, it could have been next Tuesday. But by convention it’s always a Thursday. So, today’s the big one – the very last day on which Rishi Sunak could have held an election. And after a disastrous first six months of Labour, it’s only natural to ask what might have happened if he had waited not just until last autumn, which many were advocating, but till now.

That’s what I pushed for. Go long, I begged. Not because I thought Sunak would win if he played it to the limit, but because I wanted to postpone for as long as possible an inevitably awful Labour government.

But could an election today have changed things? Might we have been saved from a Labour landslide? There’s plenty to suggest not. The country would still have been sick of the Conservatives. Mutinous Tory MPs would still have given Starmer more than a helping hand. Yes, a Jeremy Hunt Budget would have been better than that Reeves trainwreck, with spending cuts rather than tax rises, but striking unions would have regarded it as a red Tory rag to their rampaging Lefty bull. A winter of discontent was on the cards.

Keir Starmer would still have kidded us that no tax rises would be imposed on “working people”, while shamelessly standing in front of “Change” posters and displaying his awful holier-than-thou attitude, thereby hoodwinking millions into thinking that all their woes would be eradicated if only we booted out the Tories. Chances are he’d have been successful.

Yet perhaps things wouldn’t have been so straightforward. There has been a big rightwards shift in international politics since last summer. Macron’s government collapsed. So too did Scholz’s in Germany. Italy’s right-wing firecracker, Meloni, is the darling of Europe. Trudeau has finally jumped off stage, taking his virtue-signalling progressivism with him. Milei in Argentina is getting rave reviews for his Thatcherism. And, of course, there’s Trump, whose booster-tastic, wokery-busting inauguration speech would have come just 48 hours before polling day. None of that would have helped Labour.

There’s more. Sunak wouldn’t have called an election in a downpour (probably). There would have been no D-Day gaffe. Rwanda would have had half a year to prove itself. The freebies scandal would have taken the gloss off Labour’s sanctimony. We might have continued to be the G7’s fastest growing economy, unsullied by Reeves’ vandalism, as well as seeing lower inflation and interest rates. Oh, and heavy rain is forecast for today, which is assumed (admittedly with little proof) to help the Tories.

Of course, much of this would have favoured Nigel Farage too. Another six months might have allowed him to take a million more votes from both big parties, aided by Elon Musk’s interventions. That could have split the Right even more neatly, gifting Starmer an even bigger landslide, or even led to Reform outperforming the Tories. Or it could have incentivised Sunak and Farage to come to some sort of election deal, squeezing Starmer out.

There’s enough there to leave Conservative voters with an agonising sense of “what if?”. Well, it’s too late. Margaret Thatcher once said: “The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.” Sunak had no crystal ball, so he gambled and lost. Perhaps he would have done so anyway. Regardless, we must all now live with the consequences.