British prime minister Rishi Sunak took just about everybody (including many of his colleagues) by surprise when he decided that the U.K.’s general election would be held on July 4. He chose to announce this to the public while standing on a podium in the pouring rain. Perhaps he thought it made him look tough. He merely looked ridiculous. This was then followed up by a visit to, well, let’s pass the story to the Irish Times:

In the Downing Street planning meeting, it must have seemed like a great idea.

On paper, it presumably read something like this: British prime minister Rishi Sunak glides up Belfast Lough on a high-tech “flying” boat built by a local company, accompanied by his trusty sidekick, Northern Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris.

They step on to the dock to take questions from the waiting media; be sure to position the TV camera to get the yellow Harland and Wolff cranes in the background, for the clip on the evening news. Northern Ireland is done, back on the plane by lunchtime.

James McCarthy from Belfast Live asked what everybody else was thinking: “We are just yards away from where the Titanic was built … Are you captaining a sinking ship going into this election?”

Cue nervous smiles from Sunak and Heaton-Harris. If this PR exercise aimed to put some clear blue water between Sunak and his Downing Street soaking earlier this week, it was perhaps not the best choice.

Well, no.

And it is a sign of just how incompetent the Conservatives are that they had not anticipated this.

Sunak has now come up with this (via the BBC):

The Conservative Party has said it would bring back mandatory national service if it wins the general election.

It said 18-year-olds would have a choice of either joining the military full-time for 12 months, or volunteering one weekend every month carrying out a community service.

The party is proposing a Royal Commission to consider the details but would plan for the first teenagers to take part in September 2025.

The cost is expected to be around £2.5bn per year.

Under the plans, young people could choose a full-time placement in the armed forces or UK cyber defence, learning about logistics, cyber security, procurement or civil response operations.

Their other option would be to volunteer one weekend per month – or 25 days per year – in their community with organisations such as fire, police and the NHS.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.

Sunak wants to bring back the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic, does he? The spirit of an overmighty state, hysterical overreaction, and petty denunciations.

If Sunak had any sense, he would keep very, very quiet about the behavior of the Tory government during the pandemic.

It’s worth adding that national service has, for good reasons (individual liberty and all that), played a very small part in British tradition, existing for only two periods in its history. The first was 1916–19, when having entered (unwisely) into a voluntary war in 1914, it ran out of volunteers to fight it. The second time was 1939–60, understandably enough, at least, during the Second World War but decreasingly so thereafter. The last conscript was discharged in 1963, ridiculously late.

The Tory party, the party of lockdowns, net zero, penal taxation, and social-media censorship has already shown itself to be a party, like its rivals even further to the left, of the authoritarian state. Now we have this. . . .

Where the money for this initiative is coming from remains, naturally, a mystery.

Policies announced during an election campaign are meant to help win it. Theresa May broke that tradition with her proposed dementia tax in the 2017 campaign, but Sunak may have surpassed that. This policy has come under fire from left and right, will further alienate young voters, and will anger and alarm their parents and grandparents too.

Sunak has, of course, now made it easier for the coming Labour government to introduce some sort of (voluntary) eco corps or the like. But then thinking ahead is not his strongest point.