All signs are ominous for the trouble-plagued Tories in this election

Probably on the Friday after the Thursday election, he will be free to nurse his bruises at his property in California.

He has said he would stay in Britain but who would blame him for heading straight to the airport and on to the luxurious home he and his hyper-rich wife have in Santa Monica.

He has had a torrid time of it, often resembling a rabbit encircled by snarling terriers, as he was for an hour in a hot studio being harangued and accused of lying by members of the public.

To be fair, not all of the torment is his fault. He probably didn't choose the Titanic Quarter in Belfast to take questions from the hounds of the media.

"We are just yards away from where the Titanic was built. Are you captaining a sinking ship going into this election?" was one unhelpful question from an Irish journalist.

The expletives from the barely fictional spin doctor Malcolm Tucker from the (barely fictional) comedy The Thick of It are easy to imagine.

Tucker would have remembered the golden rule that in no circumstances - absolutely no circumstances - must the candidate go anywhere near an exit sign with cameras around. Unfortunately, for Mr Sunak his own real-life spin doctors did not.

Nor did they think for a moment that his early departure from the 80th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings might be a mistake.

There they were, the presidents of the United States and of France and the Chancellor of Germany, on the beach from which allied troops had launched the final push to destroy the Nazis. The significance - and the photographic opportunity - was immense, but the Prime Minister of Britain had left a lame substitute in the shape of his foreign minister in his place.

But the truly indelible image of the election campaign remains bedraggled, Mr Sunak announcing the date of the election in the drenching London rain. Out he stepped from the famous door of 10 Downing Street to make the big announcement to a battery of cameras - without an umbrella.

Back he stepped, a forlorn man, sodden to the skin, the very symbol of getting it wrong.

It didn't take a genius of a headline writer to convey a man who wanted to run the country but who couldn't command a brolly: "Drowning Street"; "Things can only get wetter"; "How long will he rain over us"; "Drown and out".

Mr Sunak had omitted to tell his cabinet colleagues about the date of the election - but the information had somehow got to underlings around him, including a police protection officer. They promptly went to the betting shop and put money on that very date. They deny wrong-doing but the damage was done. It played into the narrative of Tories out for themselves.

To be fair to Mr Sunak, he is only the one who happens to be carrying the parcel when the music stops. The damage was done earlier.

The pratfalls during the election only fed an earlier narrative that the Tories in government had come to believe that laws which applied to others (known as voters and citizens) didn't apply to them.

Mr Sunak's predecessor-but-one as prime minister, Boris Johnson, was shunted out of the job after pictures emerged of him drinking at a party in Downing Street when he and his government were telling the public that parties in lockdown were banned.

An inquiry heard heartbreaking accounts by tearful people who had not been allowed to be with their relatives on their deathbeds. A mother was unable to visit her dying16-year-old son.

Zoom calls had to suffice - and at time when the glasses were clinking away at the top of government.

As so often the denials did the damage. As the BBC reported it: "A report by MPs says ex-prime minister Boris Johnson deliberately misled the Commons over lockdown parties at No. 10. The committee says it would have recommended suspending Johnson from the House for 90 days if he had not quit as an MP".

So the election pratfalls have only cemented an earlier impression of arrogance.

Donors to the Tory party, for example, received favours.

The Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper described "cash-for-access to British politics. The more a Tory donor paid, the better their access".

"The Leaders Group had been the party's top tier donors' club, with members expected to cough up at least £50,000 ($A100,000)," the FT journalist wrote.

But that was considered too cheap so an "Advisory Group" for those who gave more was created. Mega-donors got monthly meeting with the prime minister and finance minister.

And so it continued during the pandemic when people and companies linked to the Conservative Party were given contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in a "VIP fast-track lane". The High Court of England and Wales eventually ruled the method illegal. The police are now investigating some of the contracts.

So the current dismal state of the Conservatives is not all down to Rishi Sunak. His pratfalls only follow a more serious sense of entitlement.

All the same, a dismal state the party is clearly in. Opinion polls put Labour on 40 per cent of the vote and the Tories on 20 per cent. Unless there is a miracle, Mr Sunak is out.

The widely respected "guru" of opinion polls, Professor Sir John Curtice, reckoned that the party were heading for their worst result ever "by a country mile".

He said the latest polls suggested a Tory wipeout, leaving the party with 53 MPs, giving Labour a majority of 200.

If that does transpire, there will no doubt be an almighty battle within Tory ranks between those who argue for a move even further to the right and "one-nation" centrist Conservatives (who are, by the way, a virtually extinct breed).

The current party is dominated by those who believe the route to prosperity involves cutting taxes and regulation to create a "Singapore on Thames". To their way of thinking, taxes can't be too low whatever the result for public service.

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Under the four Conservative prime ministers since 2010, public spending has been slashed, leaving a sense of what is sometimes called "broken Britain". Trains get cancelled minutes before departure; horror stories from the health service abound.

"Since 2010 funding for health has been cut by 4.8 per cent in real terms, which meant incalculably greater problems for the National Health Service," the venerable and widely respected political journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote.

"The cut for education was 15 per cent, housing 21.2 per cent, and the Justice Department by 50.8 per cent.

"Since the last of those is responsible for prisons, and since more and more people have been imprisoned every year, this could only mean that conditions in many British prisons are more squalid and horrible than ever."

In this atmosphere of crisis - and it's not too strong a word - the British public now seem to be saying, "Enough is enough. Whatever our doubts about Labour, the other lot need to go."

And that they will surely get. There is something of the Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese to the Labour leader, Keir Starmer. Both are unflashy and not over-endowed with charisma. Both are solid politicians of the social-democratic left, keen to redress the balance towards working people but not to frighten the horses too much.

Sir Keir will no doubt get his chance. But his task will be harder than Mr Albanese's. There is no magic wand for deep economic problems.

And the populist right is rising. The demise of the Tory party may open the way to rabble rousers to its right.