A shattering blow for the Tories, so what went wrong?
COMMENT
THERE’S no point in hiding the truth. The result of the General Election has come as a shattering blow to the Conservative Party and imperils not just its electoral future but also, potentially, the delivery of Brexit and, by implication, the national interest.
It’s also cost me my seat Peterborough after 12 years.
As Edward Heath found in February 1974, once you call a General Election, no Prime Minister – however far ahead in the polls – can second-guess voters.
And so it proved with Theresa May. Ironically, both the historic Brexit mandate itself and her emphatic commitment to the task of giving effect to it, had the perverse impact of convincing electors that they could refocus on other areas, such as policing, public spending and the NHS, as Brexit was in no danger.
Many anti-Establishment Ukip voters made the seemingly rational choice to vote ancestrally for Labour and Corbyn and the radical ticket. So what really went wrong? A dull, passionless manifesto lacking vision, delivered without proper consultation before candidates in STEwarT JackSon hit the streets was poorly explained and lacked the retail “pull” of the type that Cameron and Osborne, for all their faults, were adept at.
The presidential-style contest felt unnecessarily complacent and irked people who felt taken for granted, at the centre of which was a woman who is decent and hugely committed to public service but seemed to recoil from the pressures of a 24/7 media.
By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn ran a superb campaign. We laughed when he compared himself to Trump but he was in his comfort zone with a positive message, huge energy and vibrancy.
He connected with many of the same older disaffected voters who backed Brexit as well as the younger Millennial malcontents who found he was selling what they were buying – free stuff that “the rich” were paying for.
And we never recovered from the social care debacle.
For all that, I believe that Brexit is safe: if people really regretted the vote last year, they’d have supported the most Eurofanatic party, the Liberal Democrats, who polled a pathetic 7 per cent.
Actually, more than 80 per cent of voters supported parties committed to leaving the European Union and that, inherently, means quitting the Single Market and the existing Customs Union.
It is a mandate that must be respected.
Those MPs calling for a “national consensus” in our dealings with the EU are too afraid to speak plainly of their real intention – to stymie our exit, to play for time , to obfuscate in the hope that, Micawber-like, something will turn up to keep us in the EU or maybe, EU-lite.
That would not only be disrespectful of the verdict in both June 2016 and last week but hugely damaging to the UK’s prospects as an independent, global trading nation and Parliamentary democracy.