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Theresa May Remains Prime Minister
Theresa May has been to Buckingham Palace and will continue as Her Majesty’s Prime Minister. One seat is yet to declare the result of yesterday’s general election. That it is Kensington, one of the safest of Tory strongholds, and that it is in doubt is the election in a nutshell; Mrs May gambled on gaining and lost her base. From working majority to minority government in six weeks and blowing the largest slice of goodwill the Conservative party has enjoyed in a generation.
Already we have calls that the Conservatives were not left wing enough, that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour with its hard socialist message shows the electorate has moved left. Utter rubbish. The Tories got their largest vote share in decades despite their ruinous manifesto. What we have just had is a re-run of the referendum from last year with no one really mentioning it. Mrs May was right to believe that UKIP’s vote would collapse and totally wrong on how to woo them. Mr Corbyn’s vague promises on Brexit going ahead was enough to tempt former Labour ‘kippers back into the fold once Mrs May failed to follow up her Brexit rhetoric with any conviction. Worse still her policy proscriptions showed a complete failure to diagnose the Brexit coalition, to treat it as a malady rather than a rejection of the governing consensus. Endless time has been spent trying to determine the reasons for Brexit, with no concrete answer because there is not one. Rather there were a whole host of reasons, the one unifying theme was that the liberal elite were taking the country down the wrong path, whether that was immigration policy or sovereignty issues or any of the other reasons people voted to leave the EU. If the vote last year was a rejection of Third Way centrist Blairism, offering a Blairite manifesto was the height of idiocy. Failure to galvanise this base with a positive vision of the future – as the Leave campaign did last year – while the remnants of the Remain campaign quietly and carefully coordinated their side with a simple stop ‘Hard Brexit’ message, was the real reason for this complete cock-up.
Mrs May had a twenty point lead in the polls despite being the least media friendly Prime Minister in recent memory. She was Judi Dench’s M from the recent James Bond films, competently in the background organising her more flamboyant operatives while simultaneously showing she had bigger balls than any of them; Margaret Thatcher without actually having to be Maggie. Calling an election and putting herself front and centre like a presidential candidate destroyed that image and thrust her own brand of ‘Red Toryism’ into the limelight. It had gone down like a cup of sick with the Tory faithful, who were willing to see it as an olive branch to the media crowd but not campaign on it. Insulting the libertarian wing of the party (well over a third of the activists and certainly the more Brexiteer members) in a speech is one thing, equating them with socialists twice in the manifesto was another. The most common phrase of conservatives was “if it wasn’t for Brexit…” before disavowing the very Milibandesque manifesto they were supposed to sell. Consequently the public were hardly enthused, indeed the MP responsible for it lost his seat.
The silver linings from this disaster are there for those willing to read the runes. The most obvious is the fall in support for the Scottish Nationalists, kicking a second independence referendum into the long grass. While acknowledging I scoffed at the idea of a dozen Tory seats north of the border, I would have to counter that it cost a majority south of it. Whether that will be worth the instability now on offer only time will tell. Secondly, the Remain elements of the party are now weakened while the Leavers are enhanced. While this may look paradoxical the morning after the night before, if ‘Theresa’s Team’ had won a majority approaching the three figure mark the Thatcherite free market wing of the party would have been sidelined. As they have actually been the most loyal of all Mrs May parliamentary troops, we now have the chance to see them promoted. The fate of the Boris-bashing Amber Rudd, whose five thousand majority shrunk to less than four hundred in Brexit-voting Hastings, shows how the referendum last year has changed the game. The fact that Mrs May elevated this woman to succeed her as Home Secretary, and then sent her out to bat as her surrogate in the TV debate, illustrates how out of touch Tory high command are; Mrs Rudd goes down well with the media class but not the base. Again this is a lesson for the Conservative party, no matter how they pander to the political correct crowd it will never be enough to induce them to vote Tory and only alienates supporters. After the BBC quite shamelessly put its thumb on the scales in this election (and they are hardly hiding their glee this morning either), the Tories would be well advised to start taking a leaf out of President Trump’s playbook and fight back. They could follow his lead on terrorism and climate change too….
Mrs May will probably continue as a caretaker PM – the Brexit negotiations are due to start in ten days time – but she is weakened, perhaps fatally. On the other hand governing as Chairman rather than the Cabinet CEO offers her the best path to redemption. She wished to craft her own agenda to leave as a legacy instead of grasping that a successful Brexit would be her best chance at history. In the long run this election might just be better for the country, though you could put a safe bet on the Tories tacking further left in reaction to this debacle.
Published in General
So this is yet another election the meaning of which seems to be–we’re in motion, knowing not where or quite why, & therefore cautiously, slowly.
Mrs. May overleapt herself considerably. She did not want to be cautious & slow. She wanted to make big changes, ambitious policies, & principled statements. She does not seem to be the person for that job. She seems to have made a mistake in sidelining Mr. Boris Johnson during the campaign; he’s bound to rise now.
As for how the election turned out, I’m waiting for the numbers to say how come the youth vote was so high; how come with the vote increase for both Tories & Labour, Tories did not do better in England; how come they didn’t do better in Wales! Why the SNP lost so much, too.
May’s speech being dissected on the telly here right now.
Most people are asking if she’s on drugs. (In so many words. Does she think that nobody has noticed that she lost the Conservatives their majority?)
Re the DUP – that’s bad news for at least one minority, but hopefully they’ll insist on an outcome that allows the Good Friday Agreement to live and not die wrt borders and movement of people. That’s good, right?
Edit: it’s just been noted that she (May) can be really personable “one to one, or in a small group context”. This is the kiss of death. I don’t see her lasting – and my feeling is the sooner the better wrt finding a replacement. ??
I think the OP nails it. Yet again, as in the GOP, the Globalists just cannot understand why the riff-raff are unhappy with their enlightened despotic rule.
Apparently, Brexit will never actually happen. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
High turnout (69%) would suggest the young did actually come out this time. My anecdotal evidence would certainly suggest that. The UKIP vote seems to have split almost evenly between Labour and the Conservatives but the geographic fallout reversed some Tory gains from 2015 when UKIP repressed the Labour vote enough to allow the Conservatives to pip them. Though as you say, we await the numbers…
And she put away her socialist red dress and wore true Tory blue for the first time, what was that saying about bolting the stable door after the horse has shot?
Folks, let’s vote this to the main feed, shall we?
That’s big point #1.
What about LibDem? What is the dynamic for LibDem’s gain? They gained at least 5 new seats (the net 4 plus 1 more to make up for Clegg’s loss). Where did those 5+ come from? Did they act as spoilers flipping any Conservative seats to Labor?
At least one upper class seat was Tory, is now LibDem. Forget which. I don’t think they spoiled Tory seats, though-
Isn’t that what they say about Hillary? Kiss of death indeed!
I think the Republicans should look long and hard at this election and realize that just because the Dems are run by a bunch of crazy socialists doesn’t mean they can’t bounce back in 2018 to get majorities in the House and maybe even in the Senate (though given the map this is way harder). Especially if you are pushing unpopular policies, and have little to show, and the opposition is animated.
How much did the terrorist attack and response have an effect?
Would Leadsom have done better?
There was a huge tactical campaign called Best for Briain (sic) to vote against Brexit.
Is the issue a demographic that is entitled vote actually voting?
It’s true here; it’s true in the UK: You can’t out-liberal a liberal!
May could have saved us all a lot of heartache by meeting with George H. W. Bush and asking him how voters responded to four years of “kinder, gentler.”
Boris! Boris! Boris! Boris!
It was Richmond-upon-Thames where Zac Goldsmith regained his seat from the by-election result last year. It seems to buck the trend but having been out and about this morning in my area of London I’m developing a thought: Last night was a cathartic moment, a lot of people were angry about the referendum and wanted to protest that. Richmond had already done so and returned their former Tory MP, hope for the future….
And at least former Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg lost his seat!
Really hard to say at this point, might have firmed up a slipping Tory vote, it also might have worked for the opposition.
Is this at all surprising? That’s not a rhetorical question.
Don’t young voters generally go for the bleeding heart and/or revolutionary party (“Change!” “Forward!”) always and everywhere?
Aye, but they could also take the lesson that your don’t want to demoralise your own side with ‘me too’ Republicanism…
Conservatives on both sides of the pond have to really make the moral case for free markets, the under 40s are worryingly socialist. We have had Third Way BS for too long, Hayek warned that it leads to a distrust of competition.
Yes but we have election after election in both our countries where they don’t turnout, after last year it seems they did. I have two sisters in their mid-twenties one of whom watches E4, the free-to-view channel aimed at their demographic. The spots (trails?, basically the ads for the channel itself) on that portray Brexit as the end of the world and Trump as the devil.
Nick, imho Left or Right should try and win elections honestly – and that doesn’t hinge on expecting a slice of the demographic not to vote.
(Or manipulating it so that some votes are more equal than others. That just degrades the system.)
Piffle! It is undemocratic for young people to vote. Everyone’s known it since the days of Aristophanes.
As for expecting partisans to be honest–well, let’s say keeping things legal is about the best we can hope for, if we try our damnedest!
I am in total agreement old boy. I was pointing out that after last year they came out, the ‘you stole our future’ theme has had plenty of airing. Please see my comment #21 above.
I would wager it was not just the ‘young’, apparently 1 million people have joined the electoral role since last year.
A fine line to walk for sure. I think showing you can govern will both deflate dems and consolidate reps. Think how much of a boost he got getting Gorsuch. The only big party accomplishment to date.
This article is worth a read, if only for the catharsis:
I think you may be overoptimistic. Corbyn was also a lousy candidate. This suggests that Labour’s next move will be to find or manufacture its Obama:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co
They have a couple lined up already. Meanwhile the Conservatives have some extremely talented MPs languishing on the backbenches, (these two have rock solid majorities too). What was that Ann Coulter quote?
Great website. It has some sort of affiliation with the Centre for Policy Studies,which is the think tank Lady Thatcher set up. I’d plug their podcasts too but obviously not here….