There have been previous elections in which there wasn’t much enthusiasm for either leader of the two main parties. By 1970 Harold Wilson had lost his shine while many Tories were doubtful about Ted Heath. He was expected to lose and party grandees were already planning for his removal. He won but in the two 1974 elections the electorate was still offered a choice between Heath and Wilson and neither leader inspired much confidence. After Wilson and Callaghan Labour made elections easy for Thatcher by picking unelectable leaders, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. Kinnock was still leader in 1992, something which helped John Major to win against the odds, even though there were Tories in both Parliament and the country who still resented the MPs’ rebellion which forced Thatcher out. Later in 2005 Tony Blair had been discredited by his role in the Iraq war, but there was never going to be a majority for Michael Howard.
So lack of enthusiasm for both possible Prime Ministers is nothing new. Nevertheless there hasn’t in my lifetime, or indeed in my reading of history, been an election in which both the Tory and Labour leaders were so widely, and deeply disliked and distrusted. It is of course natural and quite usual for voters to dislike and distrust the leader of the party for which they aren’t going to cast their ballot. What is remarkable this time is, first, the number of those who feel like that about the leader of the party which they are accustomed to support, and, second, the number of politicians in both parties who have said that their leader isn’t fit to be Prime Minister. So one concludes that many who will vote Tory or Labour will do so despite grave misgivings, even holding their nose and feeling somewhat ashamed.
Either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn will be Prime Minister after this election and the polls indicate that it will be Johnson. They may be wrong as they have been before, as recently as in 2015 when Ed Miliband (remember him?) seemed likely to win. There may – indeed there probably will – be upsets in some constituencies; it’s quite possible for instance that the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, unpopular as the man responsible for Universal Credit, will lose his Chingford seat. Yet the likelihood is that the Tories will not only remain the largest party in the new House of Commons but will have a big enough majority to enable them to govern. That’s to say, Mr Johnson will not only remain Prime Minister but will be in a stronger position than the unfortunate Theresa May found herself in after her ill-judged and ill-managed election in 2017.
Two things make this probable.
First, no matter how distrusted and disliked Johnson may be, the dislike and distrust he provokes is nothing in comparison with the dislike and distrust felt for Corbyn. It’s not only that Labour’s election promises seem to many to belong to cloud cuckoo-land. It’s not even because the long Brexit debate has shown Corbyn to be weak, shifty and muddled. It’s because Corbyn appears to many traditional Labour voters, especially those who voted Leave in 2016, to be unpatriotic. He is seen as a man for whom Britain is always in the wrong. There has always been a strong sense of patriotism in the traditional Labour-voting working-class, a belief that Britain – or England – take your pick – is best. It goes with a resentment of foreigners, and the Leave vote in Labour constituencies reflected it. This may be unfair to Corbyn who would claim to be patriotic in his own way. But his own way is not the general way, and this is why so many working-class Labour voters have no time for him.
Second, inasmuch as this election is as much about Brexit as about anything, and indeed, everything else, Johnson’s position is clear as a bright frosty morning, Corbyn’s as foggy as a dark December afternoon. Nobody knows what Corbyn thinks or wants. Johnson’s election slogan is simple: “Get Brexit done”. This must appeal to many. More than 16 million people voted Remain and it’s likely that a majority of the young who have come on to the Electoral Register are also Remainers. Yet many who voted that way are understandably lukewarm, fed up with the whole business and prepared, no matter how reluctantly, to accept that Brexit in some form is now inevitable. So they are ready, or may be ready, to vote for the Tories. “Get Brexit Done” as a vote-winning slogan has the merit of simplicity.
It disguises the fact that disengagement from the EU is still going to take a long time unless, in boredom and exasperation, the government throws up its hands and we crash out without a deal. Anyone who doesn’t realise this should read the lecture which Sir Ivan Rogers, our former Permanent Representative to the EU, delivered in the University of Glasgow last week; it has now been published in Prospect Magazine. It’s long and detailed, and many will dismiss it as too gloomy. But it does make it clear just how difficult and tortuous trade negotiations always are, and how both the EU and the UK will be seeking to protect their positions and interests which cannot always be easily reconciled. “Get Brexit Done” may serve, almost certainly will serve, as an election slogan, but it is hard to believe that it will indeed be done by the present proposed end of the transition period, now only few days more than a year ahead.
Meanwhile even those of us who neither admire nor trust Mr Johnson must admit that he is playing his hand skilfully – skilfully enough to win an election. Nothing he has said and done might have been enough to make this possible had he been up against a credible Leader of the Opposition. Napoleon thought that the first thing a general needed was luck. Johnson is certainly lucky in his opponent, lucky too in that Nicola Sturgeon’s insistence on anther Scottish referendum on independence looks as if it may save some Tory seats in Scotland that even a month ago they were expected to lose
So, barring some unforeseen event in the next week it looks as if Johnson’s luck will hold long enough to see him back in Number 10. What happens afterwards may be something else.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.