Overview

On 22 May, Rishi Sunak stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced an election would be held on 4 July, taking the country and his own party by surprise. Standing unprotected in the pouring rain, the Prime Minister resembled a drowning rat, an image that would follow him for the next six weeks. After the Conservatives stumbled from one setback to another with bitter internal feuds boiling over, the PM leaving D-Day events early and the revelation that senior Tories placed bets on the election Sunak led his party to its worst ever defeat. His rival, Sir Keir Starmer, steered Labour to a historic victory with ruthless discipline but won his landslide with fewer votes than his much-maligned predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. In this pacy and colourful new book, seasoned political journalists Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth use new interviews and candid private accounts from key players to take the reader behind the scenes of one of the strangest but most consequential elections in recent history. They explore the decision-making behind the Tories' missteps and how Starmer hauled Labour back from defeat in 2019 but also examine the extraordinary surge in support for Nigel Farage's Reform UK, the revitalisation of the Liberal Democrats through Ed Davey's stuntman antics, and the wipeout of the SNP. This inside story is unmissable for anyone seriously interested in politics and in what the dramatic Labour landslide of 2024 means for the future of Britain.

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9781785909474

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Tim Ross is deputy head of news at Politico. He was previously executive editor for politics at the New Statesman and ran UK political coverage for Bloomberg and the Sunday Telegraph. He has written two bestselling books on British elections explaining how David Cameron shocked pundits and pollsters by winning a majority in 2015 and how Theresa May shocked pundits and pollsters by throwing it away again two years later. Rachel Wearmouth is a freelance journalist who has previously worked at HuffPost, the Daily Mirror and the New Statesman. She began her career covering politics outside of Westminster, at regional papers in the north of England and at Scotland's Sunday Post.

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