“May has no one to blame but herself”, The Times
Phillip Collins, Comment, London, June 8, 2017
The prime minister’s hubris, an addiction to short-term thinking and a surge in the youth vote has sealed her fate.
Let us begin with the opprobrium. Eleven days from a negotiation to take this country out of the European Union, a negotiation that will involve hundreds of separate aspects over a concerted two-year period, Britain effectively has no government. The Conservatives have lost their majority and it is unlikely that an administration can be formed. After seven years of essentially Tory government, that is a sorry mess to have led the country into. David Cameron and Theresa May, take a bow.
The consolation for Mr Cameron is only that Mrs May has now overtaken him as the most effective author of chaos. This was an election she did not need to call which exposed her as over-promoted. Her delphic approach to negotiating her way out of the EU is now broken. The general election of 2017 is the most momentous since the 1945 landslide, against all expectation, swept Attlee into power against the might of the war-hero Churchill. The expected Tory landslide simply did not materialise and the instant question has to be: what happened?
The first point is that this is really Mr Cameron’s doing. Referendums introduce toxins into the political bloodstream and make the body politic ill. When people voted in large numbers for Scottish independence they then confirmed that verdict by voting for the SNP at the subsequent general election. The upshot was a revolution in the politics of Scotland which swept the Labour party away and more or less abolished the concept of British politics. Something similar has happened in the 2017 election, after the European referendum of June 23 last year.
The vote loosened affiliations but in unpredictable ways. It also galvanised the young, who turned out at a rate of 72 per cent. There never used to be an age discrepancy. In 1964 Harold Wilson enthused people under the age of 25 to the extent that 88 per cent of them voted, the same number as pensioners. The falling away of the youth vote happened in a big way after 1992 when it was still 75 per cent. However, by 2015, it had fallen to 43 per cent. Meanwhile, 88 per cent of the oldest category of voter turned out. Politics became an auction to hand out prizes to pensioners who were insulated from austerity during the years of coalition government from 2010-15.
The mobilisation of the young is by no means just a revenge vote for the EU. It was also about the indefinable sense of hope that Jeremy Corbyn articulated and very much about the impatience that the country feels about austerity. It is probably too that the anti-establishment, the anti-politics vote, has all come together around Labour. Tactical voting has probably had an impact.
There is a strong critique contained in the difficult night for the Conservative Party and it needs to listen, to be humble, less arrogant and less inclined to hubris. There is also, it has to be said, a vindication for Mr Corbyn and his team who have performed far better than most people thought he could. The silent minority of those who do not vote appear to have been inspired to vote Labour and that is an achievement of the first order. Mr Corbyn often likes to say that he is going nowhere and commentators often joked that it was true. Well, they are not laughing now. Mr Corbyn has won the right to stay on as leader and MPs who do not like that prospect are stuck with him. He has had the night of his life. Mr Corbyn was fond of quoting Shelley on the campaign trail but it is Emily Dickinson, suitably adjusted, who tells the tale: hope is the man with whiskers.
The opposite applies to Mrs May whose campaign to be prime minister was a thoroughgoing calamity. Her authority is shot to pieces. Even if she can cobble together a government, there is now likely to be another general election in the autumn and Boris Johnson will be installing phone lines in his leadership office by this time tomorrow. She has turned herself into the Lady Jane Grey of British politics. It is a rank humiliation of the kind that it is hard to recall.
Quite how a government is formed is now hard to decipher. There are Labour MPs who would not support a Corbyn-led government, let alone anyone else. The so-called progressive alliance does not have the numbers to form a government. The combined Tory and Liberal Democrat score does take them over the magic number of 326 but there is no prospect of a repeat of the coalition because the two parties are so hopelessly divided on the central question of the EU negotiation. There is however, the prospect of an arrangement with the DUP.
Which brings us back to the crux. Mrs May has defined an approach to the EU, which, despite the criticism of her detractors, was in fact clear enough. Britain would leave the single market, the customs union and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. That strategy now has to be in question, as indeed everything does. Michael Gove, Mr Johnson, Liam Fox and Mr Davis need to reflect on what they have done. If it is beyond such arrogant people to contemplate the mess they have landed the country in, we might appeal to their amour propre and point out the appalling mess they have made of their own party. In 2015 I remember writing that the real risk at that election was not a vote for Ed Miliband, who would not have done much, but a vote for Mr Cameron who was a cavalier risk taker. How right that looks now.
What has happened to conservatism? It used to be the repository of sensible, solid decision-making free of ideology and wishful thinking. We all thought that Mr Corbyn and his merry band of ex-Marxists were the ideologues in this contest but we were wrong. A ludicrous commitment to a child-like conception of national sovereignty has taken the Conservative Party to the brink of humiliation. That much we can all bear and indeed it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at what happened to them. What these fools have done to Britain we should not forgive and, if and when there is another election, whoever succeeds Mrs May should be duly punished.