Sunak’s First-Ever U.K. Election as Prime Minister Will Likely Be His Last

In recent years, Americans disillusioned with their maladroit political system have often looked across the pond for some reprieve and solidarity. Since the last general elections in 2019, British politics have appeared almost equally dysfunctional. The country completed its divorce from the European Union and cycled through a revolving door of Conservative prime ministers.

Elections to Watch in 2024: This story is part of a package on 15 key elections this year (besides the United States). Read the full analysis here. 

The Trump-friendly Boris Johnson, who won the 2019 vote, may be the most notorious of that lot. An enthusiastic Brexiteer, Johnson exited No. 10 Downing St. in September 2022 after revelations that he had hosted parties while Britain was locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic; the so-called “Partygate” scandal has spawned official government investigations and been a source of tabloid intrigue ever since. Then came Liz Truss, whose tenure was famously shorter than the shelf life of a head of Tesco lettuce. Now, Sunak is in the driver’s seat.

The “nightmare on Downing Street,” as FP’s Sasha Polakow-Suransky called it, has mirrored Britain’s chaos of adjusting to a post-Brexit era. The death of longtime monarch Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 seemed to confirm that the U.K. was entering uncharted identarian territory.

By almost all accounts, Brexit has been bad for the country. Once a global superpower, Britain’s departure from the EU downgraded the country’s place in international relations and trade. London has attempted to craft an agenda called “Global Britain,” but it appears to be more bark than bite. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Dalibor Rohac argued in Foreign Policy in May 2019, “Brexit is the most reliable way of ensuring that the U.K. does not take advantage of opportunities that the global economy has to offer and that the country instead spends another decade engaged in unproductive navel-gazing while the rest of the world moves on.”

At home, the economic impacts of Brexit have hit Britons hard. Annual inflation in October 2022 was calculated at a 41-year high of 11.1 percent, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics, and the effects of the cost of living crisis are tangible. In February 2023, journalist Liz Cookman reported in Foreign Policy of rising energy prices, food shortages, and growing poverty. “If the winter of discontent does sequels, we’re in it,” Cookman wrote. “Chief among all the culprits is the destructive effect of Brexit and bad governance.” The vaunted National Health Service is also at an impasse as conditions deteriorate and doctors go on strike.

The government has decided that illegal immigration—which is on the rise—is the source of many of these woes. Under far-right home secretaries, London has promised to “stop the boats” crossing the English Channel from France. Its most controversial move was the 2022 signing of an agreement to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda. The measure earned condemnation from many observers, including the United Nations, who said it could amount to a human rights violation. In Foreign Policy in June 2022, journalist Andrew Connelly called the policy a “cruel, expensive, and pointless spectacle.”

The Rwanda deal has been held up in court, but Sunak is still trying to pass it with some modifications. Whether or not it is adopted, the Conservatives have succeeded at making immigration a key election issue. In recent YouGov surveys, U.K. voters listed their top three concerns as the economy, health, and immigration and asylum.

Sunak can technically call general elections at any time, but he appears poised to let Parliament carry out almost all of its five-year term. That’s likely because the Conservatives have long been in a polling slump. Since 2021, the party has trailed the opposition Labour Party in surveys, according to YouGov. The latest data on voting intention, from Dec. 13, 2023, showed Labour with twice as much support as the Conservatives: 44 percent to 22 percent. Smaller parties such as the pro-business Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party, and Greens scored 11 percent or less.

Labour is led by Keir Starmer, who stepped in after popular—but divisive—former head Jeremy Corbyn resigned following a catastrophic electoral defeat to Johnson, when Labour received its lowest number of seats in 84 years. Starmer and Corbyn do not get along. Corbyn has since been expelled from Labour after he denied that antisemitism within the party was a problem under his leadership. Starmer has shifted Labour to the right compared with his predecessor—more of a centrist pragmatist and less of a socialist ideologue than Corbyn.

Given Labour’s lead in opinion surveys, there is considerable speculation as to what kind of a prime minister Starmer might be. Britain hasn’t been led by Labour since Gordon Brown, who stepped down in 2010. Since then, the country has gotten much poorer—and the world more dangerous.

“He is an ambiguous figure,” journalist Jamie Maxwell wrote of Starmer in Foreign Policy in July 2023, “a onetime human rights lawyer who took a soft line on police brutality when he served as Britain’s top prosecutor and a former advocate of integration with Europe who now insists that Brexit was necessary.” Starmer’s foreign policy is equally murky: In May 2023, FP’s Azeem Ibrahim noted that “there’s not yet a coherent worldview in evidence.”

But a leap into the unknown may be desirable for Britons, who have grown weary of Conservative leadership and never-ending political drama. Whenever Sunak does choose to call general elections, voters will elect 650 members of Parliament in single-member constituencies using a first-past-the-post system. It would be the first—and could be the last—national vote he ever oversees.