How America’s 2024 election will affect Britain’s

There were many potential titles for Liz Truss’s memoir: 49 Days that Shook the World, perhaps, or simply What Happened, like Hillary Clinton’s. Instead, she’s gone for a cri de coeur: Ten Years to Save the West.

Such swashbuckling language is best suited to an American market, and the former prime minister seems to have this in mind. She has declared that her book will appear ‘ahead of the US presidential election’ and explain why it’s vital that ‘conservative arguments win – and the left is defeated’. In the PR so far, Truss has referenced Joe Biden more times than Sunak or Starmer.

It’s not just that the American book market is more lucrative. Truss wants her brand of Conservatism to influence the political debate in the US. But for the first time in decades, the British and American electoral cycles are on course to coincide, and un-happily for Truss, any effect British thinking has on America is bound to be eclipsed by America’s effect on us.

Unless the Tories’ fortunes drastically improve, there’s little chance of the British election coming any earlier. As long as Sunak is languishing in the polls, he will want to push polling day back to late autumn of next year (‘Actually January 2025 looks good,’ jokes a senior party figure). An election next November, after another party conference, would allow the party to fill up its coffers, and conference could also be used as a campaign launch pad.

The two countries haven’t held elections in the same year since 1992, and the campaigns haven’t overlapped since 1964, when Harold Wilson narrowly beat Alec Douglas-Home while Lyndon B. Johnson won in a landslide against Barry Goldwater, with the largest share of the popular vote for the Democratic party in its history.