A pratfall is falling “flat on one’s ass” for comic effect. This is a mainstay of slapstick comedy, much used by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and notably the Keystone Kops, who became a byword for comic incompetence. The exclamation mark in the Rish! leadership campaign slogan has been redeployed to the “Oh, ****! What’s he done now?” consternation of hapless Tory MPs, who hope desperately not to be unemployed in three weeks at Sunak’s latest campaign efforts.

As one centrist conservative commentator, Henry Hill, put it: “Grassroots Conservatives will have their time to assess the disaster that is this campaign. They must be unsparing… Speaking to Conservative candidates and activists out in the country, it is hard to find one with a good word to say about the central campaign… The old cliche about lions being led by donkeys might have been a slander on Lord Kitchener, but it seems like a fair description of the 2024 Tory campaign.”

There’s also somewhat of a theme to Rish!’s serial gaffes, a sense that he’s not as clever as he and his advisors think he is — and they are, too. Further, the press and public are far from as stupid as presumed.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for those MPs — the survivors or beneficiaries of the Conservatives’ purge of those who failed to be enthusiastic Brexshitters. They are broadly incompetent, mendacious or delusional. Most Brits (closer to the story than US enthusiasts) today regard Brexit as an utter fiasco, with as many as 61% thinking it a mistake and only 28% a good idea. As many as 56% are in favor of the UK rejoining the EU and a similar 28% are opposed.

Well before the Brexit referendum, Rish! was a proponent of leaving the EU — or rather, like a fantasy girlfriend, the EU of tabloid (and Boris Johnson) myth, not reality. But the “Get Brexit Done!” election of 2019 was such a massive victory for the Tories that, at the time, there were widespread predictions of unassailable Conservative majorities for a decade or more, two or even three election cycles into the future. They reckoned without the spectacular incompetence and provocative clumsiness of the three successive Tory Prime Ministers. Sunak was supposed to be a safe pair of hands after Liz Truss famously failed to outlast a lettuce — but will still manage the third-shortest premiership in modern history.

To be fair to Rish!, the prognosticators of 2019 ignored many things. Like that decades of underinvestment in the UK economy had left it in a parlous state. Or that the austerity policies of previous Tory governments had failed to shrink UK deficits, because they shrank growth faster than any reduction in spending. Or that the Brexit referendum result was heavily a protest vote against the social and economic consequences of that austerity, which Sunak as Chancellor mostly continued.

Tory privatization has turned into a long-term fiasco, too. One example is privatized water and water treatment, which has resulted in 83% of British rivers flowing with, well, shit! The National Health Service, as close to a secular religion in Britain was and is similarly afflicted by underfunding and a dearth and exodus of EU citizen healthcare professionals as a result of Brexit. They also ignored what a talentless claque those Conservatives willing to enthuse about Brexit were. Post-2016 cabinets have been largely stuffed with buffoons, ignoramuses and toxic personalities. Moreover, Brexit and its predicted adverse consequences (aka “Project Fear”) have increasingly come true. It is, as many UK commentators note, the central campaign issue neither Tories nor Labour will mention.

But is Rish! trying to lose?

However, dealt a bad hand, Sunak has played it with a level of incompetence that leaves many wondering if he’s actively trying to lose. Start with the announcement: Despite having a new, large, plush and scandalously expensive press briefing room available to him, Sunak strode out to a lectern in the street outside Number 10 to announce the 4th of July election date. Oblivious to the umbrellas the gathered press hacks were huddling under, he was doused by a near-biblical downpour as his words were drowned out by a protestor with a loudspeaker playing Labour’s 1997 election anthem: “THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER!” Most of his cabinet had only been informed moments before. Though his parliamentary private secretary, Craig Williams MP, appears to have known that date for three days, allegedly using that insider knowledge just in time to place a winning bet with bookmaker Ladbrokes on it. If he did, it’s a crime under British law.

But the fiasco wasn’t over. He followed it with a fear-mongering speech — he mentioned “security” eight times — at London’s Excel conference center, which was forcibly attended by around 100 drafted Tory political aides and advisors. But not before a reporter from the usually Conservative-leaning Sky News had been unceremoniously ejected from the event!

The next day, at a warehouse rally, he took softball questions from two Tory white-collar councilors posing as manual workers — to be promptly found out by the local press — then traveled on to Belfast’s Titanic Quarter. This invited inevitable comparisons and questions as to whether he was captaining a sinking ship. But in pursuit of what? The Conservatives have no candidates in Northern Ireland!

Rish! then briefly appeared to recover in a TV debate with Labour leader Kier Starmer, where he repeatedly accused Labour of planning a tax rise of £2,000 per family. He smugly insisted on its veracity as independently costed and verified by the UK Civil Service. The glow lasted until the next morning, when a letter from the head of the Civil Service was released, stating that the number was by no means independent. There’s no kind way to put this: Sunak was caught loudly lying. Compounding the misery, the UK’s independent statistics agency is now investigating the Tory claims.

A perk of competent premiers seeking re-election is the opportunity to pose as a statesman bestriding the world stage. Rish! was afforded a golden opportunity: the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy invasion. This wasn’t foregone by Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, the newly crowned Charles III — even Volodymyr Zelenskyy and many others. Moreover, it offered perhaps the last opportunity to pose with centenarian survivors of one of the most pivotal moments of World War II, to borrow their honor for a moment. Sunak, though, found better things to do: Rish!ng away in a helicopter, he gave a pre-recorded interview to Sky News that he wouldn’t postpone. He left his opponent, Starmer, the photo-ops with Presidents Biden and Macron, German Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the President of the EU Council and 15 other national leaders, not to mention his new King. The next day, Rish! and the cabinet were forced on an apology tour for the disrespectful gaffe.

Rish!’s wealth doesn’t help

Could it get worse? Yes! Although his elders were Asian immigrants, essentially economic refugees from East Africa — rendering Sunak’s enthusiasm for deporting more modern migrants to Rwanda ironic — his parents were well-off. They were a doctor and pharmacy-owner, and his grandfathers were an accountant and a UK tax official awarded the MBE. They sent him to the expensive Public (i.e. private) School Winchester, a more discrete version of Eton, where he was “head-boy.” In the pre-recorded Sky interview that showed a week later, Sunak made efforts to suggest he had a deprived childhood. When an example was sought, the best he could come up with is that his parents denied him a Sky satellite television subscription! The suffering!

Additionally, the adult Rish!, a former Goldman banker and hedge funder, has a personal fortune north of $100 million. Combine that with the value of his Infosys heiress wife, and his family worth is nearly $1 billion. He regularly uses it to finance expensive commuting by helicopter to the family’s country mansion, supplemented by a large penthouse in Santa Monica with views of the famous pier. (It is widely rumored that the Sunaks plan to decamp here after losing the elections.)

Rish!’s by far the richest member of the UK Parliament. His denials are not helped by widespread rumors that the Sunak daughters are already enrolled for the fall semester in an expensive private school in California, coming from an eye-wateringly expensive school in England. People are suspicious that Sunak chose not to wait until the last possible election date so the family could be safely installed before school started.

In a strange way, though, Rish! may be rescuing the Tories by inviting an even huger defeat. The biggest long-term electoral threat is a less than total Labour victory; the Liberal Democrats’ price for a coalition would be electoral reform and proportional representation, which most political analysts anticipate would doom the Conservatives as currently composed in future elections. Of course, those prognosticators may be ignoring the desperate state of the UK’s finances and economy Labour will likely inherit, or how long they can blame the Tories for that mess.

There is also little room for Labour complacency about its long term electoral prospects. Recent polling shows that though likely to win, both the “Tories and Labour [are] on course for [the] lowest share of the vote since 1945.” Labour may win a large majority, but like the Conservatives in recent elections, with a minority of the vote. Proportional representation would be hard on traditional Labour, too, for this reason is opposed by its left wing.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.