What the commentators said
I never bought the idea that May would win by a landslide, said Rod Liddle in The Spectator. Labour’s vote is a lot “stickier” than pollsters think, particularly in the North. Like Greece’s Syriza or the SNP, Corbyn is offering an “anti-establishment populist left-wing agenda” to an electorate with “a certain appetite for such radicalism”. He’s also a far better campaigner than May, who has “the personal warmth, wit and oratorical skills of an Indesit fridge-freezer”.
The Tories have fought a very dispiriting campaign, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. Their over-reliance on the PM has exposed her as “brittle and indecisive rather than ‘strong and stable’”. Now that “the high priest of negativity”, Sir Lynton Crosby, is back in charge, they will lead on “vicious personal attacks” against Corbyn: that he is “soft on terrorism”, an IRA sympathiser, and so on. The Conservatives will probably get their victory on 8 June, but it will be a bitter one because they have had “so little positive” to say. “There must be more to politics than Project Fear.” The Tories seem strangely reluctant to attack Corbyn’s greatest weakness, said Philip Johnston in The Daily Telegraph: his “profligacy”. His failure to remember the cost of his own pledge to provide free care for 1.3 million children was just the latest expression of Labour’s “carelessness with public money”. At the last election, it was generally agreed that spending had to be reined in. This time, the Tories have “partially grasped the nettle” by pledging to cut old age benefits and pension inflation. Yet they too are trying to buy the voters with more cash for “police, health, social care and the rest” ( see page 13).
On the contrary, said Steve Richards in The Guardian: the last two elections were “framed around an outdated Thatcherite fantasy”. Both main parties declared that there would be no significant tax rises, and yet the deficit could be wiped out in one Parliament or slightly more. Thankfully, the debate this time round is different. Both Labour and the Tories have made it clear that some tax rises will be needed if decent public services are to be preserved. Whatever the result, this election has moved the centre ground; British politics has shifted “leftwards”.