You’ve fired the election starting pistol, Mr Sunak, so let’s get on with it

If anyone still harboured any doubts that the UK is now in the run-up to a general election, the prime minister’s wide-ranging speech at a true-blue London think tank will have allayed them.

With the local and mayoral elections out of the way, Rishi Sunak was clearly keen to put the Conservatives’ losses behind him, and he did so by firing the starting gun on what could be a long and gruelling campaign. You could see his logic: seize the initiative, set out the big choices, try to quash criticism about any perceived inadequacies in the vision department by embracing the future – and presenting Labour as the party of the past.

You could also see the logic of selecting national security as the early battleground with Labour. Not only is it always a dependable pitch for the Conservatives, but Mr Sunak recently pledged to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030, a sum that Labour says it would match – but without the timetable.

Cue the PM warning of the risks from a quartet of authoritarian regimes – Russia, Iran, North Korea and China – and the threat from Vladimir Putin taking the world “closer to nuclear escalation than at any point since the Cuban missile crisis”. The message was drummed home with accusations of Labour’s unreliability on such matters as the UK’s nuclear deterrent, even on maintaining an army at all. Sunak depicted a world fraught with danger in which only the Conservatives can be guaranteed to keep the country safe.

Beyond national security, he touched on practically every topic that could foreseeably arise in an election campaign over coming months, from education to the NHS, from AI to net zero (just not too far and too fast for family finances), from patriotism and national cohesion, to a fresh plug for sending would-be migrants off to Rwanda – and an undertaking that if a choice has to be made between national security and complying with judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, then the choice will be the UK’s national security every time.

It was all sound Tory crowd-pleasing stuff, with the leitmotif – lest the fear factor become too dispiriting – of a future that was replete not just with peril, but with promise. And Brexit Britain, he insisted, was in a prime position to exploit those opportunities.

There were indications, too, of how Mr Sunak was going to deal with Labour’s standard attack line of 14 wasted years. “What had Labour done with those years,” goes the riposte. But there were harbingers as well of how difficult arguing the Conservative case could be.

Mr Sunak (or his speechwriters) did their best to project a big picture programme forward: the world, he said, would see more change in the next five years than it had in the past 30. He did his best to humanise his offer, with frequent references to “you and your family”, and his understanding of the cost of living pressures everyone was facing.

But it is not hard to imagine the Labour riposte to a prime minister who is more than comfortably off. And Sir Keir Starmer has already tried to neutralise Mr Sunak’s national security pledges by committing to the nuclear deterrent and to higher defence spending, while his prospective chancellor has been out and about courting business, to the point where the clear blue water of some past election campaigns can be hard to discern.

For all that Mr Sunak’s speech was an election opener, however, the one question that needs – and could have – a definite answer was left hanging. For exactly how much longer will the country have to endure an election campaign that has a start, but (as yet) no end? Is the PM hoping against hope that something will turn up to narrow, or even reverse, the odds? If it did, would voters, jaded with waiting, even notice?

Mr Sunak may be right that the national mood is trepidation about threats at home and abroad. But it is also impatience: people want to get the election over with and move on with their lives. Before regaling us further with election assurances, the prime minister’s next campaign speech should name the day.

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