In the U.S., one election season begins pretty much as soon as the vote has been counted on the previous one. From one election to the next, tens of billions of dollars are spent — on ads, on lobbying efforts, on attempts to buy influence and to secure primary and then general election votes. In the U.K., by contrast, elections are a brief — and relatively inexpensive — affair.

There are no fixed dates in the U.K. national election schedule, only a requirement that a general election for members of Parliament be held at least once every five years. Boris Johnson called a snap contest at the end of 2019, shortly after becoming prime minister (PM), meaning a new vote had to be called by year’s end.

Since it takes a brave PM to call for an election right in the middle of holiday season, and to fill the airwaves with political ads instead of feel-good movies as Christmas nears, the bets had been that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would call for an election in the autumn. Instead, facing stubbornly dismal polls that showed absolutely no sign of improvement, he announced that there would be a vote on July 4. The Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, has outpolled the Conservatives by upwards of 20 percent for over a year now, though a few recent outlier polls have shown a 12 or 14 percent lead instead. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have a growing tranche of members of Parliament (MPs) who very publicly declared that they would not seek reelection. Perhaps Sunak realized the game was up, and felt that calling an early election was something equivalent to a mercy killing.

Like so much else of Sunak’s tenure, there was something peculiarly hapless about the announcement. The prime minister, who has made the deportation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda — a punitive policy championed by his two immediate predecessors — a core part of his policy slate, stood outside of Downing Street, looking and sounding far more like a high school debater than the leader of a nuclear-armed country with the world’s fifth-largest economy. As he spoke, it started to rain — as it is wont to do in England. Somehow, his advisers had neglected to provide him with an umbrella or an awning, or to volunteer an aide who might hold said (absent) umbrella. They had also apparently failed to check out the sound system properly, so that the supposedly upbeat music that was blared forth to accompany the PM’s words ended up at least partially drowning them out.

A few days later, as part of a campaign swing through Northern Ireland, Sunak visited the shipyard that had, more than a century ago, built the Titanic. It wasn’t the best of media-ops. At one point, someone asked him what it was like to be the head of a sinking ship — and the taunts only got worse from there. Where, in normal years, the U.K.’s conservative tabloid newspapers could be relied upon to rally around the Tory leader, nowadays the notoriously bloodthirsty tabloid press seems to relish moments such as this, piling onto the inept leader at every opportunity. While some, like the Daily Mail, have........

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