Call early election to ‘minimise’ losses, senior Tory tells Rishi Sunak
A senior Conservative has urged Rishi Sunak to call an early election to minimise Tory losses at the polls.
Lord Finkelstein, a member of the House of Lords and former senior advisor, said May 2024 might be the "best moment" to go to electorate.
Recounting his experience of advising John Major on the timing of the 1997 election, the Tory peer said he now believed an earlier election would have made the defeat "less severe".
"The hope was that something might turn up. Instead voters simply became more irritated," he wrote in an article for the Times newspaper.
"The mistake is to think that a bad moment can’t become worse. Or that there is really little difference between losing power by a little and losing it by a lot.
"There is a vast difference for the Conservatives, and for Sunak ...