Sinking Sunak steers Tories towards iceberg as MPs jump overboard

London: It’s rarely wise to make Titanic jokes, one wag once observed, but sometimes it’s needed to break the ice.

As Rishi Sunak’s stuttering and stumbling election campaign entered just its second day, he stood in a Belfast shipyard where the doomed liner was built more than 110 years ago as his colleagues – acting as if it were every man, woman and child for themselves – jumped overboard en masse.

It was as if this week’s pilot episode of the Sunak sitcom was such a hit that the show’s creators had rolled out another episode by popular demand.

Britain’s Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak, left, and Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, second right, wait on board an Artemis Technologies boat at a dockyard in Belfast, on Friday.Credit: AP

Sunak will retreat from the election trail on Saturday – day three of a 42-day campaign – choosing to spend the day in his home constituency after a disastrous first few days on the hustings.

Several British media outlets reported he’d take the unusual step of a day away from public events on the first Saturday of the campaign and would instead spend it in discussion with his closest advisers after a first week plagued by missteps and high-level resignation announcements.

After his rain-soaked election announcement – drowned out by a song synonymous with Labour’s 1997 victory – faced widespread ridicule, Sunak then visited a brewery in Wales, where he asked workers if they were looking forward to the Euro 2024 football tournament. The Welsh team failed to qualify.

Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak speaks with staff at the Global Energy Group facility at a campaign event at the Port of Nigg, Scotland.Credit: AP

In Northern Ireland he visited the Titanic Quarter which led to inevitable questions about whether he was at the helm of a sinking ship.

A clearly irritated Sunak said: “If you look at what’s happened over the past few weeks, you can see our plan is working”.

Former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson mocked Sunak’s campaign gaffes, suggesting tongue-in-cheek there must have been internal sabotage.

“Is there a double agent in CCHQ [Conservative Campaign headquarters], and were they a headline writer in a previous life?” she wrote of the social media platform X.

All this came as the running count of Conservatives declaring they will not stand again for Westminster reached 78, nearly a quarter of all serving Tory MPs. That’s more than in 1997 when, ahead of Tony Blair achieving a 179-seat majority for Labour, 72 Tory MPs stood down.

Some of the names to announce they were stepping down on Friday included Housing Secretary Michael Gove, a huge figure in Tory politics.

An energised Liberal Democrats party is targeting Gove’s seat of Surrey Heath in the south-east of England, part of the so-called Tory “blue wall”.

Gove’s departure marks the end of a tumultuous political career, which included him leading the Leave campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum and standing for the Tory leadership against Boris Johnson in the same year.

He was followed out of the race a few hours later by Andrea Leadsom, who also stood for the Tory leadership in 2016, losing out to Theresa May.

Sunak has continued to face internal criticism of his campaign launch, which involved surprising the party with his rainswept announcement of the July 4 poll date and holding the vote before showpiece policies on migration and a smoking ban had been enacted or legislated.

But given the dire state of their polling — the Conservatives trail Labour by more than 20 per cent in most polls — some believe that Sunak opted to go now because this was about as good as it was going to get.

A new YouGov poll for The Times taken since the election was called has Labour on 44 points and the Tories on 22 – three points down since the start of the week. Reform, the popular party targeting the Conservatives’ right flank, is up two points on 14 per cent despite Brexiteer Nigel Farage’s decision to rule himself out of the campaign.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, still relatively unknown to the public, cautiously backed the creation of a Palestinian state in a round of media interviews but stopped short of saying whether a Labour government would follow the examples of Spain, Ireland and Norway in recognising Palestine immediately.

Speaking on the BBC, Starmer said: “I absolutely believe in it... we need a viable Palestinian state as well as a safe and secure Israel”.

Labour has attempted to straddle the divide on the issue in recent months, with wounds still raw from the antisemitism crisis under Starmer’s predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.

In a day of high drama, Corbyn was finally expelled from the Labour Party after announcing his intention to stand as an independent candidate in his long-time seat of Islington North.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.