Achi news desk-
It appears though that Mr Sunak believes things are as good as they are going to get for his premiership, and is gambling on the six-week campaign allowing him to close the gap.
Here are some of the other big political gambles – some of which paid off and some of which definitely didn’t.
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Theresa May, 2017
Operating with a slim majority of 17, Ms May struggled to make any progress on Brexit due to internal divisions within her party.
His aim was to rectify that by calling a general election, with polls showing the Tories leading by 21 points over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor party.
Instead Ms May lost 13 seats as Labor recorded its biggest share of the vote since 2001 and left her dependent on the DUP to get anything passed in the house.
After two years of varying degrees of lack of lock he was forced to give up.
David Cameron, 2015
A gamble that paid off in the short term but not in the long term was Mr Cameron promising a referendum on EU membership in the Conservative manifesto for the 2015 election.
The Tory leader hoped to see off the threat of UKIP by introducing a vote on Brexit and it worked, his party winning 24 seats and achieving the majority they could not five years earlier.
It proved to be a bit of a poisoned chalice though, with Mr Cameron campaigning to remain and immediately resigning when the vote was lost.
Gordon Brown, 2010
This is probably an example of a Prime Minister being afraid to pull the trigger and it is costing him.
Mr Brown was initially very popular when he took over from Tony Blair, with speculation in 2007 that he would call a snap election and polls predicting that he would win.
He chose not to, and with a global recession hitting the following year conditions were never so favorable again.
When the election was eventually held in 2010 it resulted in a hung parliament but the Conservatives emerged as the largest party and have not been out of government since.
SNP, 1979
Amid a period of political unrest, Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher tabled a motion of no confidence in the Labor government, led by James Callaghan at the time.
The SNP chose to vote in favor – two of their 11 MPs abstained – after the failure of the first referendum on devolution and the government fell by just one vote.
Mr Callaghan has since said his government would have eventually fallen anyway, but in the subsequent election Ms Thatcher won a majority and the SNP lost all but two of their MPs.
The Scotland Act was repealed and devolution would not take place until 1997, and the SNP would not return double figures to Westminster until 2015.
Harold Wilson, 1974
The second election to be held that year after Harold Wilson initially failed to win a majority in the first vote in February.
The Labor leader went to the country again in October, winning a majority of three seats.
