British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pulled the plug. He’s gone to the King to ask for an election to be called. The writs have been issued. The election will take place on 4 July.

Now, Sunak could have waited till later this year. Yet he opted to go early and to do so with his party, the Tories, massively behind in the polls (20 points or more) and with an incredible 78 current Tory MPs having announced they will not contest the election. There are various theories floating around about why Sunak opted to bring on his party’s overwhelmingly likely early demise. One is that his own MPs were within two or three names being submitted to the 1922 Committee (a backbench Tory MPs’ outfit) to trigger a leadership contest that would surely have seen Sunak replaced before the next election. On this theory – and it’s only a theory because it’s a secret which MPs have submitted their names – the PM heard he was soon likely to be rolled and decided to take his chances with the electorate rather than suffer the ignominy.

Another theory doing the rounds for why Sunak opted to bring forward what is overwhelmingly likely to be a huge Tory loss is that he and his ‘moderate’ advisors calculated that going early would limit the damage. The Tories would lose but lose less badly than if they waited. Why? One reason is that going early would probably keep Nigel Farage on the sidelines.Disaster loomed had Farage opted to take over the leadership of the Reform party from Richard Tice (and it was effectively an open invitation from the worthy, but not crowd-pulling, Tice to the rockstar-for-Brexiteers Farage). Right now the Reform Party sits on about 13 or 14 per cent in the polls. Were Farage to come back as leader then the Tory party high command feared that Reform could actually get a higher percentage of the votes than the Tories. Under the British first-past-the-post voting system the Tories would almost certainly still win more seats than Reform, because of where the votes are concentrated. But having the Tories finish behind Reform in vote percentages could well be a death knell for the democratic world’s oldest political party. So the thinking might have been ‘go early to keep Farage out of the main action’. If so, it appears to have worked as Farage has confirmed he will help out but will not take over the leadership of Reform. Farage says he’s going to concentrate on helping Donald Trump in the US because the American November election is the most important one for any conservative in the world, not least because Labour will win in the UK come what may. Farage is not obviously wrong about that choice.

Another reason for Sunak wanting (or even almost being compelled) to call an early election is that his Rwanda plan to stop the illegal boats full of illegal immigrants crossing the Channel is garbage. It won’t work. He knows it won’t work. His own MPs know it too. Having an early July election lets him pretend it will work. An election later this year would take place in the full publicity of its failure. As an aside, and as the Reform party makes clear, the boats could be stopped but first you have to get the unelected judges out of the way, and that means withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights with its overseeing European judges who take frankly ridiculous activist positions that make enforcing borders basically impossible. (By ridiculous, I mean they reach decisions clearly at odds with the intentions of the treaty drafters and with its explicit wording.) The only way to get the British judges out of the way is to withdraw from this treaty. The Tories won’t do it. Reform would. Remember, the Tories in Britain have also promised every single year of their thirteen years in power to reduce legal immigration and it has instead just gone up and up. It is plain that the Tories are addicted to mass immigration that props up the bogus GDP indicator while doing nothing for GDP per person. All of us need to stop paying any attention to GDP statistics on their own.

Anyway, those are the theories floating around about this near-suicidal decision by Sunak to go to the country on 4 July. The British papers are spilling metaphorical rivers of ink talking about it. But you know what the legacy press is overwhelmingly not talking about? They are not speculating on the rather obvious counter-factual of how the British Tories would be placed right now if then PM Boris had shown the backbone of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and ignored the Covid modellers, the public health caste, the fearmongers and those in his cabinet who favoured aping the thuggish, heavy-handed, near-authoritarian lockdown response of the Chinese politburo. How would the Tories look now had Boris refused to lock down (remembering that no-lockdown, no-young-kids’-school-closures Sweden has fewer cumulative excess deaths from start of pandemic till now than Britain and than virtually all of Europe, and that is without the myriad other costs Sweden has avoided)?

Put differently, today’s British government is buried in bad news: inflation is bad; the NHS health service that was bad before is now simply awful, maybe the democratic world’s worst, including as regards waiting lists; government borrowing is sky high; the ‘we demand to work from home’ public service is unproductive and astoundingly self-entitled, and a fair few big corporations aren’t all that much better; excess deaths are bad; there are huge increases in school truancy; public order and criminal case backlogs are worse; the list goes on and on. And it is all directly related to the British government opting for lockdowns, deliberately scaring people witless, pretending the virus was equally dangerous to all when we knew from the start it was 1,000 to 10,000 times less dangerous for those under 30 than for those over 70. If you just print money and spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money to pay people to do nothing while locked in their homes, closing schools and universities for almost a year off and on, weaponise the police, explicitly tell people not to go to hospital for non-Covid matters unless they were near dying, well, that is not a cost-free set of choices.

As all of us lockdown sceptics said from day one, the costs are going to massively outweigh the benefits. They have. And it will just get worse and worse.

I think the Tories would have been in a winning position today (for all their other faults) had they gone with principle and not locked down. But the bell is about to toll for the incredibly useless British Tory party – ask yourself what they accomplished after thirteen years in power and the list is even less than the exiguous, miniscule list you get when asking what nine years of Coalition governments delivered for conservatives here in Australia.