When Rishi Sunak told his cabinet, after weeks of agonising, that he would hold a surprise July 4 general election, he immediately won the effusive support of his housing minister, Michael Gove.

“Who dares wins,” Gove said on Wednesday afternoon, quoting the SAS regiment’s motto. “You dared — and you will win.”

Gove would have received odds of 25-1 at Ladbrokes if he was prepared to back his assertion about a Sunak election victory with hard cash; the prime minister has embarked on a six-week campaign with his Conservatives trailing the opposition Labour party by more than 20 percentage points in opinion polls.

Not every minister backed his decision to call a snap election: Esther McVey said he should have waited longer to let the fruits of economic recovery feed through to voters. Ominously, McVey is the “minister for common sense”.

But Sunak received an enthusiastic show of ministerial support — loud banging on the cabinet table — as he prepared to venture out into the Downing Street rain to announce the July 4 election to the nation shortly after 5pm.

“We’d been checking the weather forecast for days,” said one Number 10 staffer, after the prime minister was drenched giving his statement. “But Rishi was only ever going to announce the election in the street. It was very British.”

Sunak’s decision to hold a summer election sparked an angry backlash from some despairing Tory MPs bemused by his move to go to the country when the party is so far behind in the polls.

One former minister branded the decision “insane”, while another Conservative MP said they felt “resigned” to losing their seat.

Lashing out at Sunak and his ability to jet off to California if he is defeated at the election, one arch Tory critic fearful of losing their seat said bitterly and with some exaggeration: “I don’t own a ranch in California.” (Sunak owns an apartment in Santa Monica.)

Other Conservatives insisted they did support Sunak’s decision. The mood among cabinet ministers was “up for it”, said one, who described the reaction to Sunak’s move as “a mixture of surprise and excitement”.

His allies said he had been increasingly minded to call a summer election over the past six weeks, with the decision crystallising in his mind over the past fortnight.

Crucially Sunak consulted chancellor Jeremy Hunt and they agreed that waiting until the autumn would bring little additional economic cheer, not least because the public finances could not withstand further tax cuts.

There were fierce debates inside Sunak’s inner circle about the timing of polling day; campaign chief Isaac Levido had long favoured the autumn, while chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith was thought to back an early election.

“In the end, they all agreed that it was Rishi’s decision and they would back whatever he wanted to do,” said an ally of the prime minister. “It was finely balanced, but this showed strength and courage — that’s what the public want from their politicians.”

Some backbench Tory MPs agreed. One said the decision showed “boldness”, while another said they were prepared to take the argument to voters. Positive sentiments were also aired on Conservative WhatsApp groups.

Speaking at a rally held at the ExCel Centre in London on Wednesday evening, Sunak told supporters that the past few years had been tough but he had delivered on his first priority. “To drive back inflation to normal.”

Ministers lined up around Sunak — who was still wearing rain soaked trousers — as he said that the “penny had dropped” around Europe that the government’s Rwanda asylum scheme was the way to tackle illegal immigration.

“We Conservatives have got a clear plan with bold action to secure a better future,” he said.

What Tory MPs admitted they could agree on was that the snap election had caught them by surprise. Sunak’s decision was so tightly held that even his closest cabinet allies were kept in the dark until the eleventh hour.

It was only at the unusually timed cabinet meeting on Wednesday afternoon that Sunak revealed his plan — less than an hour before he announced it to the country.

While ministers are normally permitted to miss the weekly cabinet meeting to attend to other pressing business, on this occasion Number 10 issued the instruction that all must be present.

That forced Lord David Cameron, the foreign secretary, to cut short a visit to Tirana where he had travelled to discuss immigration with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama.

Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, was meanwhile forced to delay a planned visit to the Baltics.

These moves and others — including chancellor Hunt’s decision to pull out of a television interview — fuelled speculation at Westminster on Wednesday morning that Sunak was about to call a summer election.

MPs, advisers and journalists frantically appealed to each other — both in the corridors of the Palace of Westminster and on WhatsApp — for concrete details about what Sunak planned, as the rumours reached fever pitch.

Just after midday, Sunak was challenged at prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons about the speculation by Stephen Flynn, the Scottish National party leader at Westminster. Sunak failed to rule out a snap poll, and his press secretary also declined to stamp out the possibility.

By early afternoon, most MPs believed a general election was likely. “It looks like it’s on,” said one Labour MP, who claimed the party was ready.

A despondent Tory MP said they believed that any Conservative colleagues with a majority below 15,000 were at risk.

The first clue that Sunak was considering cutting and running emerged last week, when Conservative bosses convened to discuss money and fundraising for a potential July poll.

Senior Tory figures were instructed to reach out discreetly to megadonors to see if large-scale donations could be elicited at short notice.

The crunch talks were first reported by the Financial Times, though Conservative officials dismissed the significance of the conversations at the time.

Shortly after cabinet ministers traipsed into Downing Street at about 4pm, senior Conservative figures confirmed the prime minister would announce the general election would take place on July 4.

Storm clouds hovered over Number 10 as journalists crammed into the press area waiting for Sunak to make his statement. The prime minister will hope the climate for the Conservatives improves in the next six weeks.

LOS ANGELES — Hunter Biden’s trial on nine federal tax charges will move from late June to Sept. 5, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Scarsi had originally scheduled the trial for June 20. But attorneys for the president’s son argued in a federal courtroom Wednesday that the trial schedule collides with a separate criminal case against the younger Biden on gun charges that is set to go to trial in Delaware on June 3.

Israel recalled its ambassadors to Spain, Ireland and Norway on Wednesday to deliver a “severe reprimand” to the three countries after they committed to recognise Palestinian statehood next week.

Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz branded the show of support for the Palestinians a “folly”, adding: “History will remember that Spain, Norway and Ireland decided to award a gold medal to the murderers and rapists of Hamas.”

The move will add to the number of the EU’s 27 members that recognise Palestinian statehood, but does not include heavyweights from the bloc such as France. In a blow to their hopes for a broader diplomatic push, other countries that Madrid and Dublin had courted in recent weeks, including Belgium, Malta and Slovenia, did not immediately follow suit.

Ireland’s Taoiseach Simon Harris said he was “confident further countries will join us”. The trio said their move would take effect on May 28.

The move comes amid a split within the EU over a move by the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel and Hamas, as countries within the bloc struggle to unite on a response to the war in Gaza. It also follows a UN General Assembly vote this month backing a Palestinian application to become a full member state.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who launched an offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 35,000 people following Hamas’s October 7 attacks in Israel, had “no peace project for Palestine”.

Sánchez said: “Fighting the terrorist group Hamas is legitimate and necessary . . . But Netanyahu is creating so much pain and so much destruction and so much rancour in Gaza and the rest of Palestine that the two-state solution is in danger.”

Norway, which brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in the early 1990s, said recognition of a Palestinian state was “the only alternative that offers a political solution for Israelis and Palestinians alike: two states, living side by side, in peace and security”.

Ireland referred to its own pitch for international recognition as it struggled for independence just over a century ago. “From our own history, we know what it means,” Harris said.

Israel said on Tuesday that Ireland’s recognition for a Palestinian state would “lead to more terrorism, instability in the region and jeopardise any prospects for peace” and urged: “Don’t be a pawn in the hands of Hamas.”

The Palestinian Authority welcomed the three countries’ move, saying they had “demonstrated their unwavering commitment to the two-state solution and to delivering the long-overdue justice to the Palestinian people”. It called on other countries to follow suit.

Most UN member states already recognise Palestinian statehood and Palestine is also recognised by Sweden, which acted alone in 2014, and several central and eastern European members that had recognised it before joining the EU.

France has yet to take the step and has been seeking to rally other countries, including the UK, to back a wider bid.

France’s foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, said: “Our position is clear: the recognition of Palestine is not a taboo for France. This decision must be useful and permit a decisive step forward on the political level.”

He added: “[It] should be a diplomatic tool to help achieve the two-state solution [of Israel and Palestine] living side by side in peace and security. France does not consider that the conditions were present to date for this decision to have a real impact in this process.”

British foreign secretary Lord David Cameron said in January that the UK could recognise Palestinian statehood as part of “irreversible steps” towards a two-state solution to the protracted Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Arab and Palestinian officials have said recognition of a Palestinian state should be a crucial step to underpin moves towards a longer-term resolution of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to bolster a future administration for the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

They want the US and other major western powers to support Palestine’s full membership of the UN through the Security Council. But the US this month opposed a resolution that would have paved the way for full Palestinian membership of the UN.

The three countries’ move prompted a sharp reaction from rightwing figures within Netanyahu’s government. The far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, on Wednesday wrote to the prime minister demanding “punitive steps” against the Palestinian Authority in response to the European decisions and other Palestinian moves on the international stage, including seeking action against the Jewish state by the ICC.

Smotrich called for measures including a major expansion of Jewish settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and the freezing of Israeli tax transfers to the PA.

The PA, established in 1994, exercises limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank but lost control of the Gaza Strip to Hamas nearly two decades ago. Both territories are viewed by the international community as the basis for a Palestinian state.

Later on Wednesday, the extreme-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem, and said the site — known to Jews as the Temple Mount — “belongs only to the state of Israel”.

He spoke out against a Palestinian state at the contested site, which is regarded as the holiest in Judaism and the third-holiest in Islam.

Also on Wednesday, Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant said Israel would expand a law to allow Israelis to return to settlements in the north of the occupied West Bank — regarded as illegal by most of the international community — from which they had been banned since 2005. 

John O’Brennan, professor of European integration at Maynooth University in Ireland, said the move by the three countries was more than a gesture. “If it was merely symbolic, the Israelis would not have recalled their ambassadors.”

Additional reporting by James Shotter in Jerusalem