The Leeroy Jenkins Election

All right chums, I'm back! Let's do this!

One of the things about being a young Gen-Xer, like our current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is that your go-to memes are two decades old and, despite being early YouTube videos, make no sense to the TikTok set. But, to you, the aging readers of Political Calculus, perhaps they are more relevant. And if not, let me explain.

In 2005, in the early days of viral video clips, one of the viral-est ever was a clip of a bunch of people playing World of Warcraft. Sounds fascinating I know. I can’t claim to really understand WoW (as I’m led to believe it’s called) but the gist is it’s a multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons style game with lots of people playing online at the same time and chatting to one another about their strategies to collectively make it through dungeon-based levels. Right, I think that description has suitably sucked the joy out of it.

Now World of Warcraft is serious business - the enemies are fierce, the players’ party easily overcome. So it requires strategising, particularly when the party seems to be facing insurmountable odds. Those strategies need to be carefully and patiently planned and deftly and deliberately executed. This particular mission is to collect some ‘divine shoulders’ (don’t ask) which one character - a certain Leeroy Jenkins - needs. It’s a risky venture. Another player Abdul calculates the chances of success are only 32.3 (recurring) percent. How Abdul does this, who knows? But it’s a mission that requires delicacy and care.

What would totally ruin it is someone charging in before everybody’s ready, declaring the campaign afoot, and proceeding to force the rest of the party into a doomed battle. I hope the point of my analogy is becoming clear.

Leeroy Jenkins is the name of the unfortunate player who charges straight in, shouting his name at high volume, leading inevitably if humorously to the deaths of the whole party at the hands of what appear to be hundreds of eggs hatching into winged demons. I guess Leeroy never gets his ‘divine shoulders’. An HD (not really very HD) version of what transpires is here - feel free to join the 23 million who have already watched it.

I hope my heavy-handed analogy has become clear to you. Rishi Sunak is Leeroy Jenkins. The Conservative Party, are the dungeon-exploring WoW party, facing a delicate and challenging mission: to win a General Election. If Abdul - read Isaac Levido - were to calculate the odds of victory I suspect they would be lower than 32.3 (recurring) percent. What the party absolutely don’t need though, is the person they are trying to help, ignoring the plans and charging in without telling them. And yet…

This series of tweets from Nicholas Watt, the BBC political correspondent, this afternoon, show the sheer Leeroy Jenkinsness of the predicament Rishi Sunak has put the Conservative Party in by announcing a July election.

Total panic has ensued in the Conservative Party. They knew winning the next election was a low odds mission. But there was a path - hope that something turned up by the end of the year. It could be an unexpected economic boom. A mega-scandal bringing down Keir Starmer. A military conflict that panicked the public. Most unlikely of all, it could be England winning the Euros. But the election on July 4th pre-empts any of that. There can be no Micawberish hoping for something to turn up. Or if it does, it better happen pretty bloody quickly.

A discombobulated party is also unlikely to roll in behind PM Sunak’s campaign with smiles on their faces. Watt’s posts indicate that a number of MPs are whispering about a no-confidence vote. That would obviously be very very funny. But we have heard such rumours before and usually to little effect.

Now it’s also true that the other parties have been Leeroy Jenkinsed too. Labour have been making a lot of noise about how they were already on a war footing, expecting that the election might be sooner than the autumn. They had a decent video to roll out this evening and Starmer made a well-received speech that had the double merit of neither being in the rain, nor drowned out by the theme music of the opposition party. But still, they have a lot of very young and fresh-faced candidates. As Tom Hamilton, whose brilliant Substack you should all follow, noted, in Selby and Hartlepool the combined age of the candidates is under 50. As a Gen-Xer this makes me sad.

Moreover, there is little time to get future ministers (let’s face it, most likely from the Labour Party) up to speed for entering government. Labour had had the summer to get people ready. That’s not going to happen and there are going to be quite a few new junior ministers with very brief introductions to their briefs. A summer election will probably mean more ingenue ministers and ultimately less effective government.

The SNP can’t be happy either, given that they are going through their worst run of polling for years (now behind Labour) and with a leadership election ongoing. The Lib Dems by contrast will probably be OK since Ed Davey’s strategy is tightly focused on particular winnable seats rather than the slightly vainglorious campaign of 2019.

One other victim of Leeroy Sunak (see what I did there) is Reform UK. As Duncan Robinson noted in this fabulous Bagehot column, Reform UK aren’t really a political party in the normal scheme of things. They are a brand, some money, a couple of identifiablish leaders (Tice and Ben Habib), a really identifiable founder but not (yet) leader (Farage), and a bizarre grab-bag of parliamentary candidates, the selection process for whom has a sort of Dirty Dozen quality (or Dodgeball for younger readers).

I suspect, given the problems Reform UK were already having in removing candidates who had made racist comments, advocated setting wolves on people in cities, or were simply dead, that Tice and company will not be able to stand MPs in every constituency with such a short time until election.

The kneecapping of Reform UK may be one reason why the Leeroy Jenkins manoeuvre is less mad than it might appear. Another is simply that everything is as likely to get much worse for the Conservative Party as it is much better over the coming months. The drop in inflation today disguised an increase in services inflation, which in turn means the Bank of England are less likely to lower interest rates. The quasi-victory over the Rwanda policy that Sunak forced through in Parliament will not be easily converted into actually flying migrants to Rwanda. The boat crossings of illegal migrants will likely surge over the summer. The prospect of a destabilising Trump victory might rise. And England, believe it or not, might not win the Euros.

And so, despite the wishes of his party, Rishi Sunak has charged into the fray. And while Leeroy’s co-players were laudably refrained in their insults (“you moron”, “you dumbass”, “you are just stupid as hell”), I suspect some more industrial language was used by Sunak’s fellow Conservatives this afternoon. They are probably charging to their electoral deaths. But with glory in their leader’s eyes.

Today was some day for politics fans. There was this whole election thing. But also, the first episode of my new podcast with Tortoise and Open Society Foundations: “What’s Wrong with Democracy?” came out. In it, we talk about an even more important ongoing election - that in India. I am lucky enough to be joined by Pavi Suryanarayan, Metal Mukherjee and Daniel Ziblatt. I’ll write another Substack post about over the weekend - I hope! - but in the meantime you can listen to it here.