What I got wrong in 2024

Good morning. As 2024 comes to a close, I have looked back on my analyses this year to see what I got right and, more importantly, what I got wrong. I do this for a couple of reasons. First, I think it is a good bit of cognitive hygiene. Second, while I don’t think politics has laws, it does have rules of thumb and heuristics that are right more often than they are wrong. This exercise is a good way of assessing them.

It was a big year and also, therefore, a good moment to check in both on my misses and on some of those heuristics more broadly. First, some thoughts on my mistakes. (You can read last year’s self-audit here. My 2022 takeaways are here: part one and part two).

Standing the test of time

I wrote more times than I like to think that the most likely date for the general election would be, well, about now: sometime in autumn 2024 to winter 2025, essentially whenever Rishi Sunak judged the latest possible date would be.

My reason was simple. One pretty reliable heuristic is that governments that are behind in the polls don’t go to the country any earlier than they have to. Labour held on as long as it could in 1950, 1979 and 2010. The Conservatives also kept going as long as possible in 1964, 1992 and 1997. (Yes, John Major went a month earlier than he needed to in 1992, because he felt that April 2022, the anniversary of when he met his wife, Norma, was a good omen. But I don’t think that really counts as an exception to the trend.)

In addition, none of the people responsible for the day-to-day conduct of the Conservative election campaign thought that it would be a good idea to go to the country any earlier than autumn 2024.

As you will all know, Sunak did not hold on until the latest possible date. Instead, he called an election in the summer. The Conservative party machine visibly was not ready, his manifesto, his campaign strategy, the whole endeavour were visibly undercooked, and while it probably only made a marginal difference to the vote’s outcome, his choice of election timing certainly did not help the Tory party.

What’s annoying to me about this bad call is I had written, repeatedly, that one of the useful lessons of the 2020 to 2024 period was Sunak’s remarkable, and at times self-destructive and self-defeating, political courage. Going to the country in July 2024 was a good example of that.

In general, the heuristic that “parties that trail in the polls don’t go to the country any earlier than they have to” is going to perform better than “Rishi Sunak has a great deal of political courage”, and in any case I don’t think it is all that likely that any specific lessons about Sunak are going to be of any use in future.

This was at least a miscalculation foretold: I said at the end of last year that one mistake I might make in 2024 was in predicting that the Conservatives would not go to the country any sooner than they had to:

It would be brave but foolish to go to the country any earlier. But Sunak has shown that “brave but foolish” is a zone he occupies quite a lot.

There’s a useful reminder of another heuristic here too: which is that “candidates matter”. They matter in that their national or local popularity can produce better or worse results, depending also on the candidate’s organisational effectiveness. But they matter too in that “the party leader has a record of making brave, foolish choices” is more important than “governments don’t go to the country any sooner than they have to”.

Now try this

I’ve just finished playing Cyberpunk 2077, a brilliant game set in a dystopian alternate Earth. Bleak but beautiful. Now looking for something more life-affirming.

Henry Foy, lead writer of the Europe Express newsletter, lifts the lid on the FT’s Brussels coverage in the latest “meet the journalist” video series, where you can also hear our banking editor Ortenca Aliaj and Los Angeles bureau chief Christopher Grimes talk about what makes them tick.

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