Wobbly polls and warnings ignored, 53 days that sent politics into a spin
Barring a return to Cabinet, former education secretary Michael Gove’s most lasting legacy will be his celebrated remark about having “had enough of experts”. After yesterday’s results, haven’t we all? We thought we had made allowances for the fallibility of polls, and surely a 20-point lead and the presence of electoral magician Sir Lynton Crosby would be enough to give the Tories the majority they sought? Evidently not.
Two weeks ago, when the Tory lead had tumbled from 20 points to just five, it was assumed to be a midelection pat on the back for plucky Jeremy’s spirited campaign before reality returned. Even two days ago, most experts were still expecting an enhanced majority. So stand by for some busy re-writing of recent history.
Only now are we hearing how unhappy some Tory staffers were with the campaign. It didn’t bother them when an overall majority looked likely.
Just as, during the campaign, the wisdom – the inevitability – of calling an early election was a given. Yet we have forgotten that, two months ago, such a thing seemed a nearimpossibility.
When, 53 days ago, Downing Street told the world Theresa May would be making an announcement, almost no one knew why. She didn’t look ill, and her office had denied any suggestion that there would be a poll. The idea that one could be being planned without the lobby getting the faintest whiff of it was an affront to its professionalism.
But it was being planned. Mark Textor, Crosby’s business partner, had arrived in London in mid-march. Detailed poll data was pored over in secret meetings at Chequers. A few days later the New Statesman helpfully reported that May had been warned by Crosby that in any early poll the Tories would lose many of the seats they had won from the Liberal Democrats in 2015. Crosby has a phenomenal record, so if he was advising against, in the media’s mind, that was that. But the reverse was the case.
What sealed the deal was the vicar’s daughter giving herself permission to change her mind. Having gone to the country (walking in Snowdonia), she decided she would, after all, go to the country.
Downing Street’s cloak and dagger announcement was a PR masterstroke. Of course the PM needed a mandate, to see off those devilish Europeans. She was the strong and stable candidate for the premiership. And the polls were endorsing her decision. For three weeks, the Tory lead was well into double figures. May unveiled her battle bus, occasionally reminding us that the Conservative party was allowed to tag along too. She was the one who had survived the Home Office, the one who understood power. As if to oblige, Diane Abbott popped up on LBC to tell listeners that Labour would be putting an extra 10,000 police officers on the streets and, by her sums, would be paying them a total of...£30 each per annum. Or was it £8,000 a year?
Oh yes, the Tories insisted, May was the one. She may be a bit wooden. She may be a bit strait-laced. She may even be the sort who makes her husband take the bins out. But that’s the appeal. She knows what she wants. She’s competent. She’ll be no pushover in Brussels. Then came manifesto week.
Labour published theirs on May 16, just after four polls appeared showing the party on more than 30 per cent. The manifesto was, said Corbyn, “radical and responsible”. This “ideological bloodbath”, as one newspaper called it, was certainly Corbyn’s own, supposedly part of moderate Labour MPS’ cunning plan to ensure his defenestration after a heavy defeat.
Two days later the Tories were in Labour-marginal Halifax to launch their manifesto. It brought the biggest wobble of the campaign. An admirable promise not to duck one of politics’ most-ducked issues, social care, misfired badly. A plan that would leave some of those with the cruellest, most long-term ailments open to unlimited costs did more than any other to undermine the aura of stolid competence that May had built up.
The phrase “dementia tax” ended up on the front page of a Tory-supporting paper. That weekend, four new polls were published. The Tory lead was down to between nine and 13 points. On the Monday, three days after health secretary Jeremy Hunt said there would be no cap, May switched, announcing…a cap. “Nothing has changed,” she protested, but now she looked incompetent. She had gone from strong and stable to weak and wobbly.
It has long been a Crosby strategy to answer only those questions you want to answer. But May’s refusal to take part in television debates or talk in detail about Brexit made her look fearful, defensive and dissembling. “Strong and evasive” was never going to be a good look. It was emblematic of a campaign Alastair Campbell yesterday called the worst he had ever seen.
The day when “nothing [had] changed” was drawing to an end when change of a truly awful sort happened. A young extremist targeted an audience of excited teenagers with an improvised explosive device, killing himself and 22 others as they left a concert in Manchester. It was the worst terrorist atrocity seen in Britain for 12 years, and campaigning was halted.
Life had to go on, and after a few days, so did the campaign. And Corbyn was having a good one. Among the young, his brand of conviction, idealism, personal decency and mannerliness made him unsinkable. The only doubt was whether they would actually turn out (a remarkable 72 per cent of them did). Accusations of IRA sympathy seemed to rile only those already inclined against him. Plus, if David Cameron had won elections by bribing the old, Corbyn’s promise to end tuition fees was having a comparable effect with the young. Though much of the media chose to ignore it, we were witnessing the biggest increase in Labour’s share of the vote since 1945.
And then the UK was hit by its third terror attack in three months, when eight Saturday night revellers in London were murdered by knifewielding Islamist extremists. Again, campaigning was suspended, this time for just one day. May did not waste that Sunday, though, warning that things were going to have to change in counter-terrorism.
May’s tenure at the Home Office came under more scrutiny than after Manchester. If things needed to change, had she really been that competent?
Was she not responsible for cuts to the police, who have no great love for her? Here, as with the social care U-turn, was an issue that contradicted the PM’S claims to competence. Corbyn stepped forward as a champion of law and order, which, shall we say, had never been an issue of the highest salience for him hitherto.
At the end of the week, all that looks like mere skirmishing. Now we know the result, we have parked our poll-based prejudices. And can count the ironies. That we have purportedly returned to two-party politics, in which hung parliaments are supposed not to happen. That, contrary to the plans of Labour recidivists, the only person who “owns” a bad result is not Corbyn but May.
That May, whose preferred hallmark was not to do things the Cameron way, opted to hold an unnecessary poll, misread the mood and now risks losing her job as a result. Unlike Cameron, she is staying to mind the shop, but will doubtless have time to learn a lesson from her decision to hold a snap election: If it ain’t broke, just Brexit.
‘Among the young, Corbyn’s brand of conviction, idealism and personal decency made him unsinkable’