Rishi Sunak’s biggest opponent at the general election will be the British public

Editorial: Lee Anderson once reflected that the Tories won in 2019 because of ‘Boris, Brexit and Corbyn’ – this summer, they will have only their record of failures

Rishi Sunak looked somewhat beleaguered and washed out in the rain at the Downing Street podium – an irresistible metaphor for the serial incompetence his administration has suffered (PA)

Oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them.” As political adages go, it is as reliable as any and suggests itself readily to describe the likely shape of the British general election of 2024. And this government looks set to lose this election in spectacular and historic fashion.

Labour, to be sure, has indeed transformed itself from the messy organisation that lost so calamitously in 2019. Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues have done as much as any opposition in history to present themselves as a competent government-in-waiting, and their senior personnel are as impressive as their opposite numbers. Put at its simplest, the voters are no longer so frightened by Labour as to feel they are obliged to vote Tory.

Yet it is the Conservatives who have squandered the formidable political advantages they possessed after the December 2019 general election. It takes an effort, now, to recall quite how dominant a position they then held. Boris Johnson, albeit on a false prospectus, had won their biggest vote share since 1979, and secured their largest Commons majority since Margaret Thatcher’s hat-trick win in 1987.