I can’t think of any election that’s left Britain so im perilled
A gloomy DOMINIC SANDBROOK, drawing on lessons from history, says we should be very, very worried
DURING the cold, grim days of the mid- 1970s, as Britain staggered through two deadlocked elections, a minority Labour Government, two miners’ strikes and a three-day week, the London Evening Standard ran one of the most memorable headlines in our recent history. It read simply, ‘ ABSOLUTE CHAOS TONIGHT: OFFICIAL’.
Those were the words that came into my mind at ten o’clock on Thursday evening, as the exit poll flashed onto the TV screen and it became obvious that Theresa May’s great election gamble had ended in utter disaster.
We live, of course, in an age of political shocks. Nobody expected David Cameron to win a majority two years ago. Few pundits expected that Britain would vote to leave the EU this time last year; even fewer thought that Donald Trump would become President of the United States.
Yet even by those standards, this week’s stunning election result represents something extraordinary.
Given how far ahead the Conservatives seemed to be at the outset of the campaign, I cannot think of a modern electoral shock to match it.
More importantly, though, I cannot think of any General Election that has left the country in such a perilous position, with our politics plunged into chaos, our currency hurtling towards an abyss and our position in Europe — the very issue this election was supposed to decide — more uncertain than ever.
As the results were being declared in the early hours of yesterday morning, some commentators made parallels with Edward Heath’s disastrous election gamble in February 1974, when he asked the country for a mandate to take on the striking miners — and lost.
Others looked further back, to 1923, when another Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, called a snap election only a few months after becoming Prime Minister, only to lose his majority and hand the initiative to a reinvigorated Labour Party.
But I think the current situation is much worse than in the 1920s, and perhaps worse even than 1974.
Indeed, given that we are about to begin the immensely complicated Brexit negotiations, and given the sheer extremism of Mrs May’s strengthened Labour opponents, I believe this may be the darkest and most dangerous hour for our country since the summer of 1940, when the Nazis rampaged through Europe, Neville Chamberlain fell from office and Britain faced Hitler’s war machine. BACk
then, of course, we had Winston Churchill to save us. There is, alas, no such consolation today. Even a few days ago, I would never have imagined that I would be writing these words.
Like most people, I found the election campaign almost uniquely dishonest and dispiriting, and was as shocked by Labour’s shamelessly deceitful attempt to bribe the electorate as I was by the Tories’ astoundingly unimaginative, clumsy and negative efforts.
Even so, as dusk fell on Thursday, I still thought Mrs May might secure a decent working majority and a personal mandate to take into the Brexit negotiations.
Instead, it will be a badly weakened and potentially doomed Prime Minister who faces the Brussels elite on June 19, while an emboldened Labour Party — now completely in thrall to its hard-Left leadership — licks its lips with anticipation.
If nothing else, Mrs May and her colleagues have learned an immensely painful lesson: the country does not like snap elections. What is more, a Prime Minister who calls a snap election cannot dictate the terms of the campaign or limit the debate to a single issue.
Older readers will remember that when Edward Heath launched his own catastrophic gamble in February 1974, he asked the country to answer a simple question: who governs — the government or the miners?
But not only did the British people resent being dragged to the polls, millions of them used their votes to protest about other issues, such as the state of the economy, the cost of living and the difficulty of getting housing.
Alas, the close- knit cabal surrounding Mrs May — for whom many Conservative MPs now have nothing but furious contempt — refused to heed the warning of history.
In their arrogance, they thought they could limit the debate to Brexit and nothing but Brexit, ignoring the fact that many voters were desperate to hear an optimistic economic message after years of austerity.
What was even less forgivable was that they believed they could win by parroting a handful of robotic and, frankly, moronic mantras: ‘Brexit means Brexit’, ‘Strong, stable leadership’ and so on. Apparently, their political consultants had assured them that this would guarantee victory. Well, we all know how that turned out.
For Mrs May, the result is a personal disaster of almost incalculable proportions.
Her colleagues may be rallying round for the moment, and the support of the Democratic Unionist Party should allow her to remain in office in the short term.
Even so, I find it impossible to see how she can possibly rebuild her authority within her own party, let alone with the electorate as a whole.
I say that with some sadness, because she has always struck me
as a figure of considerable moral integrity.
But political credibility is a finite resource: once spent, it is almost never regained. And, let’s be honest, as the results came in, you could almost see Mrs May’s authority draining away.
Under normal circumstances, perhaps this would not be such a problem. The Conservatives would form a minority government and then, perhaps in the autumn or next year, elect a new leader. Life would go on. But these are not normal times. Whatever your views of Brexit, the fact is that the British people gave the Government an instruction last June, and the Government is honour-bound to deliver on it.
What is now clear, however, is that the Brussels elite are determined to drive the hardest possible bargain, humiliating Britain as a warning to other EU member states. When the talks begin in nine days time, we will find ourselves alone against 27 other nations, who — if the rhetoric coming from Paris and Berlin is any guide — now see themselves as our implacable antagonists.
Even if Mrs May had a clear mandate, this would be a daunting challenge. As it is, she will begin the negotiations as a lame- duck Prime Minister, hobbled by her humiliation at the polls. Perhaps you don’t find this frightening, but I do.
I suspect that the EU negotiating team in Brussels will now take the opportunity to demand the most punitive possible terms, including an £84 billion ‘divorce bill’ that could cripple our economy for years to come. Whether Mrs May could sell those terms to her own backbenchers is anybody’s guess.
Propped up by the Democratic Unionists, and with her authority inside her own party fatally weakened, she may well find it impossible to reconcile the most fervent Brexiteers with the die-hard Remainers.
That raises two, frankly, terrifying prospects.
One is that Britain could crash out of the EU without a deal of any kind, which could send the pound into free-fall, shatter confidence in our economy and leave millions of manufacturing jobs at risk. The second, and perhaps even more chilling prospect, is purely domes- tic. For if the Conservatives tear themselves apart — as history suggests they are perfectly capable of doing — then that could hand power to the most extreme Opposition leadership in my lifetime.
In the past, I have been a fierce critic of Jeremy Corbyn. But to do him justice, he personally fought a brave and upbeat campaign, against all the odds, and achieved a stunning result.
The history books will record this as one of the most extraordinary political shocks of all time, and there is no getting away from the fact that this has been Corbyn’s personal achievement.
Even so, the very real prospect of him as Prime Minister, propped up by a bloodied and bitter Scottish National Party, seems to me utterly terrifying.
Quite apart from the prospect of a wild £60 billion spending spree (free university tuition, billions for the NHS and so on, to be funded by old-fashioned class-war taxes on British businesses), a Corbyn government could mean leaving Diane Abbott in charge of our security, putting John McDonnell in the Treasury and giving Nicola Sturgeon a veto over every line of new legislation.
One of the greatest failures of the Tory campaign, I think, was that it completely failed to impress on the British electorate precisely what this would mean.
I have heard comparisons with the Labour Party under Michael Foot in the early 1980s.
Yet Foot was a seasoned former Cabinet minister, while most of his senior frontbenchers were more moderate than the far- Left stereotype suggests.
In their inexperience and their extremism — Mr McDonnell, for example, is an unashamed Marxist, who boasts of wanting to undermine the capitalist system — the current Labour leadership is not remotely in the same league.
To me, at least, the prospect that Mr McDonnell and his friends could soon be handling our national finances is not just worrying but downright petrifying. AS
for the thought of Corbyn and McDonnell running the Brexit process, which will set the direction of our national political and economic life for generations to come, well, that is simply off the scale. ‘ Absolute chaos’ does not even begin to cover it.
Are there silver linings? One or two, I suppose.
In Scotland, the tigerish Ruth Davidson once again showed herself the most charismatic presence in British politics. And for those of us who cherish the Union, it was tremendous to see the dogmatic separatism of Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish Nationalists given such a stinging rebuke.
But I am clutching at straws, I know.
The truth is that Thursday’s result could hardly have been a worse outcome, not just for Mrs May and for the Conservatives, but for our country’s prospects of surviving the inevitable political and economic tempests ahead.
And if you doubt it, just consider what could be coming.
Mrs May could be gone within months. The Government may not even last till the end of the year.
Faced with impossibly punitive terms, Britain could crash out of the EU without a deal.
And at the helm, we could well have the most extreme Labour leader since the 1930s, with a Marxist Chancellor and a Home Secretary who once celebrated terrorist victories against the British state, all reliant on a narrow nationalist who wants to destroy the United Kingdom.
In the future, historians will surely shake their heads in disbelief that, from a position of such apparent superiority, Mrs May’s advisers contrived to plunge us into such chaos.
But for the time being, we can only pray that a shell- shocked Government recovers its composure and its discipline, rallies to its stricken leader and prepares for the horrendously hard work to come.
Never in my lifetime have the stakes been higher.
It is not just the health of our economy, the survival of millions of jobs, the security of our country and our future as an independent trading nation that are now at risk. It is the survival of the United Kingdom itself.
It was Theresa May herself, ironically, who told us that politics is not a game.
I fear that in the coming weeks and months, we will discover how terribly right she was.