Is Sunak's sinking campaign the worst in British history?

He is soaked in Downing Street on his launch, drowned out by triumphant Blair's anthem, his MPs are fleeing the battlefield and he visits a Titanic museum. When you think things cannot get worse for Rishi Sunak, they do. Is this the worst start to an election campaign in history?

- DAVID MADDOX

Those with a distant memory can recall Michael Foot's 1983 election campaign for Labour with the manifesto described by the late Gerald Kaufman as "the longest suicide note in history". But what went down in folklore as the worst ever election campaign one which nearly saw the destruction of Labour - may have found its match in catastrophic miscalculations and farce.

There are a number of people apparently giving Mr Sunak advice but whoever was responsible for getting the prime minister to visit Belfast's Titanic Quarter should be sacked already. If the image of an unsinkable ship holed by an iceberg and sinking inexorably to the bottom of a deep blue ocean is not a metaphor for what is happening to the Tories before our eyes, then nothing is.

Of course, the Titanic infamously did not have enough lifeboats for the passengers to escape. This may explain why so many Conservative MPs have declined to board Mr Sunak's election campaign ship and decided not to run again. By Friday night, 78 of them had decided to quit in a shocking indictment of the party.