British PM Rishi Sunak (right) and Labour leader Keir Starmer (Image: AP/Alastair Grant) Phwoaarrrrrr. He’s only bloody gone and done — oh hang on, Boris isn’t in charge anymore. Rishi Sunak, the UK’s bank branch advisor — “Hi I’m Rishi, take a seat, I’ll just get some details” — who turns down your loan application, has taken the country to the polls six months earlier than required.

Great Britain and Northern Ireland will elect a new House of Commons on July 4, a commemorative date of an earlier British government triumph. It is a truth universally observed that the election will result in a rout of the Tories and the installation of a majority Labour government. Labour currently leads in the polls by a stonking 23% , which in a first-past-the-post system translates as a genuine landslide, a majority of 100-150 seats or more in a 651-seat parliament.

That includes a reclamation of many of Scotland’s 60-odd seats from the beleaguered and chaotic Scottish Nationalist Party. The reason for the Tories’ presumed upcoming defeat is a big double whammy. The government has been beleaguered, as all Western governments have, by the remorseless rise in the cost of living, the housing crisis (especially in London and the south-east), and the steady decline of social services — especially the NHS through underfunding.

The austerity of the Cameron-Clegg years closed local public libraries, rural bus services and a hundred other features of the basic web of socia.