Despite his insistence that he had a plan for almost everything, the luckless Prime Minister didn’t appear to have one that covered what would happen if his announcement of a general election took place in driving rain.

Still, there are plenty of plans in place for other policies that the Conservatives have up their sleeves, although a six-week long campaign is going to test voters’ patience.

So, who came out on top in week one and who might be drowning their sorrows? Rishi Sunak had the early advantage of springing a surprise but that didn’t last long.

Among the most shocked were dozens of Conservative MPs who had their own plans to resign up-ended and were forced prematurely into announcing they would not be contesting the election.

No one could begrudge the South Thanet MP Craig Mackinlay who said as much as he wanted to contest the election, his continuing recovery from sepsis had to come first.

However, the steady drip of MPs - described as an exodus - unwittingly gave the impression of rats deserting a sinking ship. It has left local parties scrabbling around trying to find new candidates in just a matter of two weeks.

They include Tunbridge Wells, where Greg Clark said he was quitting as it was time to ‘pass the baton on’ - and it now might just pass to the Liberal Democrats, who will fancy their chances of making a long-awaited parliamentary breakthrough in a seat which, in the political lexicon, is now firmly ‘in play’.

As to Labour, its focus on target seats in Medway was already an open secret and party leader Sir Keir Starmer beetled down to Kent to mark the start of the campaign.

The party’s election buzzword is ‘change’ - and after 13 years in opposition, you can understand why. The challenge will be to articulate what change means other than replacing the Conservatives, which is self-evidently the masterplan.

There was another spin doctor’s nightmare when Rishi Sunak went to Ireland and gave interviews and posed for pictures with the Titanic ‘visitor attraction’ in the background. It could have been worse - at least there were no deckchairs to be seen.

Meanwhile, it seems the election announcement also caught the populist Reform party on the hop and forced its hand on whether Nigel Farage would step back into frontline politics and contest a seat, to which the answer was “not this time”.

Intriguingly, some had speculated the reason the party had not selected candidates in two Kent seats - Dover and East Thanet - was they were being kept open just in case Nigel had decided he wanted to enter the fray.

On balance, Labour secured the bragging rights in week one but the election will be a marathon rather than a sprint. And if you do get fed up with hearing about a plan for this and a plan for that or why things must change, console yourself with the fact you are not alone.

Hold on to your hats.

• Labour has an interesting affinity with Medway at general elections, stretching back to its landslide under Tony Blair in 1997.

It kicked off its campaign in Chatham and a visit to a youth centre, where Blair deployed all his political guile and skills, playing pool with teenagers.

But it was his wife Cherie who proved the star attraction: on a hot day, she was prevailed upon to “autograph” various bare-chested youths to much acclaim.