The Daily Telegraph

May’s gamble failed, but she must carry on. She owes it to the country

This result was an example of how everything has changed – and Corbyn was the one who understood

- READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion CHARLES MOORE

The Conservati­ves won this election, but Theresa May lost it. They got a 5 per cent increase in their vote, achieving the second-largest total in their history, 42.5 per cent of those voting and 60 more seats than Labour. But Mrs May decreed that the snap election which she called should be about her, not her party. She invited the presidenti­al comparison between herself and Jeremy Corbyn, but then consistent­ly refused to produce the evidence the voters needed to settle the question. In that comparison, Mr Corbyn won a moral victory.

The result is therefore the opposite of what she intended. She called an election she did not have to call, in order to get a personal mandate. She got no such mandate. Yet she remains Prime Minister.

The logic would seem to be that she should go. In February 1974, Ted Heath decided to ask voters “Who governs Britain?” when he did not have to. An irritated electorate replied “Um, well, wish you hadn’t asked”, and removed his overall majority. Heath tried to stay in power by doing a deal with the Liberals, but failed. More than five years of Labour government ensued.

Mrs May’s comparable gamble has failed, so why should she stay in office? The answer is numerical. She has 22 more seats (and two million more votes) than Heath had that dark February, and Labour has 40 fewer. With her minimum of 318 MPS and 10 Democratic Unionists, she has a working majority. No other conceivabl­e combinatio­n does.

These figures dictate her duty. Although Mrs May never said so in the election campaign, ours is a parliament­ary system. The Government has to be carried on. In almost all circumstan­ces, the leader with the best numbers to carry it on, must.

She owes it to the country. If she took her party out of office at this point, she would be behaving selfishly, blaming her party for her own mistakes. If she resigned, she would trigger a contest, producing the instabilit­y which she has always said she is so anxious to avoid.

Mrs May’s punishment fits her crime. She now has to learn to do what she has never done before – govern through the Cabinet, talk to colleagues and develop new policies through consultati­on. She has to break out of her tiny circle of advisers: this process began last night. Her task is thankless, because it is virtually impossible that she will ensure her own long-term survival.

Until Thursday, it was supposedly herself alone. Now she has to recognise that the words “Theresa May” appeared on no ballot paper in the country, except in Maidenhead. She sought to be master. Now she has to find a way of saying to colleagues that she is their servant, and recognises that she continues only at their pleasure.

Her statement outside Downing Street yesterday showed no sign that she understand­s her new role. She was right to assert the duty of her party to continue in office, but shockingly wrong to speak as if nothing serious has happened. Her words contained no acknowledg­ement whatever of the state we are now in, nor any contrition (her apology to candidates came as an afterthoug­ht later in the day). They illustrate­d the same errors which caused such problems in the campaign. It seemed as if the whole thing, once again, was concocted by her tiny team without reference to any elected person other than her. She had held no prior meeting of her most senior ministers, let alone of the whole Cabinet. She had just returned from telling the Queen that she was in a position to lead a new government. Did she really know that? Whom had she asked? Rather than conciliati­ng the colleagues she had just put through all this, she sounded as if she was defying them.

“Now more than ever,” Mrs May told us, “Britain needs certainty.” Yet her campaign had sowed nothing but doubt. Before it, polls showed that voters trusted her to see through Brexit, attend to the economic needs of the “just about managing” and look after national security in the face of terrorism. In the course of the campaign, she failed to prove any of these propositio­ns.

Possibly Mrs May was advised that the speech she made yesterday would show courage and determinat­ion. Certainly it was fighting talk. But it did not correspond with reality. When Ted Heath clung on as leader after losing two general elections in a year, a Tory backbenche­r famously reminded him that the leadership was “a leasehold not a freehold”. The way Mrs May was talking, she sounded like a squatter refusing to move.

In predicting, as I did, that Mrs May would, despite everything, win an overall majority, I foolishly ignored this column’s own mantra, invented after the financial disaster of 2008 – “Everything Is Different Now”.

Voters have become absolutely unforgivin­g of politician­s who do not level with them. If they feel that they are evading the issues of the day, they give them no second chance. By calling an early election, Mrs May created the opportunit­y to level with them, but then ran away.

To his credit, Jeremy Corbyn recognised this. He seized the campaign as his best chance to communicat­e. He attacked the arid rhetoric of austerity and correctly identified the deep anxiety about the public services. Unfortunat­ely, his remedies were almost completely prepostero­us, but younger voters can scarcely be blamed for ignoring this when Mrs May offered no hopeful vision of a free society not controlled by the state, and over-traded on fear.

Yes, Mr Corbyn was irresponsi­ble to propose policies which no government could ever afford, but remember that he was not expecting to form a government: he was trying to advance a movement. Sure enough, he lost, but he has gained what he sought. To use the name of his own vanguard organisati­on, he now has momentum.

Thanks to the fact that Everything Is Different Now, Labour lost every seat in Glasgow in 2015. This time, thanks to the same rule, they won Kensington, one of the richest constituen­cies in the country, with a majority of just 20. Both these facts are quite extraordin­ary, yet typical of our time.

Voters searching unhappily for authentici­ty in politician­s now treat it like speed-dating. Mrs May had her brief chance, and blew it. Mr Corbyn grasped his. This morning, the only Tory still in the authentici­ty game is Ruth Davidson.

Perhaps voters have become unreasonab­le, demanding solutions that simply aren’t available. But in a sense, they are justified. Democratic politics is supposed to be the best method of addressing the big problems of the age. Since 2001, in relation to terrorism and security, and since 2008, in relation to money, the people we have elected have not really succeeded in this task, so we restlessly search for new ones.

It is a strange paradox that all this chopping and changing has accidental­ly brought the two-party system steaming back. For the first time in nearly half a century, that old phrase “the minor parties” to refer to everything except Labour and Tory more or less covers the case, with even the Scottish nationalis­ts on a fast-ebbing tide. The stage is set for a serious contest between Left and Right about the future of the democratic West. Mrs May, taking on the least qualified and most extreme Labour leader in history, was worsted. This is hard to understand, harder still to forgive.

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