Campaign in which the winner lost and the loser looks like they won
POLITICS is a strange business.
Based on last week’s UK General Election, you can really lose when you win and really win when you lose.
Prime Minister Theresa May made a ‘Horlicks’ of the campaign on a General Election that she didn’t need to call, but did so in a greedy grab for the massive majority that the opinion polls suggested was there for the taking.
From that high-point it was steadily downhill as she blundered her way through a campaign with extraordinary arrogance and policies of smokes and mirrors that could have been interpreted any which way you choose.
Even after the horror of two terrorist attacks in Manchester and London which stalled campaigning and should have given her the space to reset her campaign and change course, she did not alter her messaging or style of campaign.
‘Strong and stable’ government became a noose around her neck, she was lampooned for using it again, and again, and again. If Fine Gael lost votes for ‘Keep the Recovery Going’ during the 2016 General Election campaign, ‘Strong and Stable’ was a dead weight on her designs on a landslide victory.
Yet as we woke on Friday morning, the Tories were still the largest party by nearly 60 seats and just shy of an overall majority, with one of their largest shares of the vote in recent elections, but there was no disguising the disaster of the result.
Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn was being feted as a heroic figure, a victor, a man of the people, as Labour tasted their third successive electoral defeat.
The expectations of Labour and of Corbyn were so low that a return of 262 seats and 40% share of the vote was being celebrated by party members as if they had just received the keys to 10 Downing Street.
Over 60 seats short of a winning majority and around the same number of seats as Gordon Brown won in 2010 and Labour were in party mode. Another possible five years of Tory government was ignored in celebration of pyrrhic victory.
Despite the spin that Corbyn is putting on it, saying that he is preparing for government and ready to make amendments to the Queen’s Speech, the numbers do not add up. Labour lost.
It is a sign of how far they had fallen that they are celebrating a third successive defeat.
Once the dominant force in Scotland, their result there was much improved on their 2015 result, when they only won one seat, but they only won seven seats, six less than the Conservatives and way, way behind the SNP who won 35.
Theresa May may have caused the greatest self-inflicted political wound in history, but Jeremy Corbyn’s view of the world through red-rose tinted glasses is distorted.