Rishi Sunak’s election marketing campaign nightmare begin as 5 pledges beneath highlight

Rishi Sunak’s election campaign got off to a nightmare start when he was forced to admit no flights will take off for Rwanda before the election.

The Prime Minister conceded on Thursday there was no way that his key pledge to deport asylum seekers to the African country would be met by polling day in July. Despite no one being sent to Rwanda so far, the Government has already sunk £290million into the scheme, which was first unveiled by Boris Johnson in 2022.

Mr Sunak boasted: “If I’m elected, we will get the flights off.” But pressed on the timing by LBC, he admitted: “No, after the election. The preparation work has already gone on”. It means a deportation flight may never take off to Rwanda as Labour has vowed to scrap the multi-million pound deal and instead create a new Cross Border Police Unit to tackle small boat crossings.

The Rwanda plan is the cornerstone of Mr Sunak’s failed pledge to “stop the boats” crossing the Channel. Home Office figures showed 9,882 people reached the UK using the perilous route so far in 2024 – up from 7,297 in the same period last year.

Keir Starmer accused the Prime Minister of calling the election in July as he thinks the plan won’t work. Speaking on a visit to Gillingham, in Kent, Mr Starmer said: “I don’t think he’s ever believed that plan is going to work, and so he has called an election early enough to have it not tested before the election. We have to deal with the terrible loss of control of the border under this Government, we have to tackle the small boats that are coming across but nobody should be making that journey.”

It marks a miserable start to the election campaign for the beleaguered PM, whose party is already 20 points behind Labour in the polls. Mr Sunak was also confronted over his failure to meet another key pledge – to get NHS waiting lists down – as he spoke to workers at a distribution centre in Ilkeston, Derbyshire.

The PM admitted he hasn’t made the progress he hoped to after Mick Shergold said he’d been waiting 12 weeks for a scan, while his wife had endured a three-year delay. Mr Shergold, 68, said he was concerned that “nothing’s being done”.

The PM responded: “The area where I wish I’d made more progress is with waiting lists. A priority of mine is to cut waiting lists and we haven’t made as much progress as I would have liked, I have to be honest about that.” Mr Shergold, a supervisor at the distribution centre, told The Mirror afterwards: “I’ve got personal issues with the NHS, my sister in law got diagnosed with breast cancer and it’s just wait, wait, wait.”

Nevertheless he declared himself a fan of the Prime Minister, posing for a selfie with him before he left. Mr Shergold, a supervisor at the firm, said he believes immigration will be the central issue in the General Election. Mr Sunak was also accused of running scared after it emerged that a seemingly-random man quizzing him at a campaign event turned out to be a Tory councillor.

During the session – billed by Tory HQ as a “staff Q&A” – he was asked about immigration by a man in an orange high-visibility jacket.
It later transpired that the audience member was Dr Ross Hills, a Conservative councillor on Leicestershire County Council and a part-time dentist.

Journalists and TV viewers were not made aware that Dr Hills is an elected Tory member. A Labour Party spokesman said: “Rishi Sunak spent months dodging the verdict of voters and even now he’s still running scared.”

A Conservative Party source told The Mirror that it wasn’t deliberate. The source claimed: “We do not control who asks questions – anyone can try and ask one.”

Since the PM sprung the July 4 election on the nation, four Conservative MPs said they were joining the exodus of departing MPs.
Those quitting include ministers Jo Churchill and Huw Merriman, James Grundy, the first ever Tory MP for Leigh, and Deputy Speaker Eleanor Laing.

Rishi Sunak’s five pledges

Halving inflation
The PM’s top priority was halving inflation from an eye-watering 10.7% at the end of 2022.
Price rises fell to 4.2% at the end of 2023 so Mr Sunak did achieve his aims – even if critics say the Bank of England was really responsible for the fall.
Inflation dropped to 2.3% in April.

Economy growing
The Prime Minister never specified exactly how this would be measured.
The best bet is GDP growth figures which found the economy shrank by 0.3% in the final quarter of 2023.
Things were only marginally better in the first three months of 2024, with growth up by 0.6%, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Debt falling
Mr Sunak said he would ensure national debt is falling to secure the future of public services.
But the latest figures from April put it at an estimated 97.9% of GDP – 2.5 percentage points more than at the end of April 2023.
It remains at levels last seen in the early 1960s.

Stop the boats
This isn’t going well at all. The PM made this one of his central pledges, but has repeatedly refused to say if he intends to achieve this before the election.
Home Office figures showed 9,882 people reached the UK using the perilous route so far in 2024 – up from 7,297 in the same period last year.

Cut NHS waiting times
Mr Sunak admitted yesterday(THURS) that he’s not done as well as he hoped.
Latest figures from the British Medical Association show 7.54 million cases of people waiting for treatment in March, affecting over 6.5million patients.