How will Britain vote on July 4th?

LIKE THE hands of an old grandfather clock, British elections come around with some uncertainty. On May 22nd Rishi Sunak, the Conservative prime minister, confirmed the next election will take place on July 4th—the third election in just over seven years. Three election models, built by The Economist’s data team, show that after 14 years in power the Tories’ time is almost certainly up.

Start with our poll tracker. There are now fewer prospective Tory voters than there were 20 months ago, during the disastrous 49-day prime ministership of Liz Truss (see chart 1). The Conservative gap with the opposition Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, has been around 20 percentage points for more than six months. That is a fatefully big deficit: no governing party has entered the final nine months of a parliamentary term with so much ground to make up and won an election.