Mr Sunak’s No 10 is better at keeping secrets than most.

When we get to election time, political forecasting suddenly becomes a lot harder and a lot riskier. Election campaigns change everything, not just the news cycle.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for not foreseeing the announcement of the general election last week. Jack and Sam’s Politics.

There were some clues – an authoritative tweet from Financial Times reporter Lucy Fisher – but we didn’t heed the signals.

👉 Listen above, then tap here to follow Jack and Sam’s Politics wherever you listen to podcasts. 👈

This week on Jack and Sam’s podcast, Politics at Jack and Sam, they reflect on just how good No. 10 is at keeping secrets, in stark contrast to his predecessors.

But when elections happen, the way information travels changes and everything becomes more complicated.

General Election Updates: Conservatives attack Starmer’s ‘stamina’

Political news usually comes in many forms: parliamentary sessions, government announcements, written and oral questions, MPs themselves, including ministers, wandering the corridors of the House of Commons and sometimes journalists stopping to gossip.

Come election time, that all disappears, as decisions and information are held by a tighter knit group and it becomes more important to keep things secret from the other side.

So it’s not feasible to have a weekly political outlook podcast, so we’re doing a daily one instead. More on that later.

Rishi Sunak‘s allies freely acknowledge that the timing of a general election is a delicately balanced debate, with both sides making a case.

One of Sunak’s big motivations for stepping down now is that he has delivered on some big things – his welfare package, his defence spending pledges and his NHS workforce plan.

But they found that people were not listening and the polls were not working. They were “not being listened to.” They blamed people for being disengaged and apathetic about politics, and that was what motivated the decision to hold elections.

Another major consideration was that internal economic indicators were available in March and early April that suggested economic conditions such as inflation and interest rates might be favorable enough to support a campaign.

Interestingly, they say there was no “decision” meeting two months ago, or even three weeks ago. This movement was like a slow rising tide.

nevertheless Labor Some staff were on holiday, others were privately convinced that nothing was going to happen this summer, Labour’s campaign buses were not yet ready, and candidates insisted they were quite happy with their results so far.

But the biggest challenge over the next five weeks will be whether they can handle the pressure of an election campaign and the relentless demand for more on all fronts.

There is currently a widespread view that Mr Sunak has had a miserable start. In a few weeks’ time the chancellor may be seen as a brave warrior braving the odds in the rain.

That doesn’t seem likely at the moment, but having experienced the 2017 election campaign, I know anything can happen.