Corbyn’s clever campaign

When Theresa May called a snap election seven weeks ago, she was quite reasonably banking on a Tory landslide, said George Parker in the FT. Simply by projecting an image of strength, the Prime Minister was confident she could romp home with a clear mandate for the coming Brexit talks. How wrong she has proved to be. Instead of a procession to Downing Street, May has faced a “slog to reach the finishing line”. Her popularity has slumped. Polls show that 38% of voters see her in a more negative light than they did at the start of the campaign – just 21% have a more favourable view of her. You can see why, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. In the past few weeks, the PM has flip-flopped over the cost of social care and ducked a direct TV debate with Jeremy Corbyn. When put under pressure in interviews, she has appeared “rattled” and totally “wooden”, resembling nothing so much as an ill-programmed automaton. Even some Tories now refer to her as the “Maybot”.

May’s biggest error was failing to provide any real offer in the manifesto that voters could latch onto, said James Forsyth in The Spectator. Tory candidates had difficulty explaining on the doorstep what people would get by voting Tory, aside from the “Miliband-like cap on energy bills”. She has also managed to alienate her own party members, said The Economist. A poll last week conducted by the Conservative Home website found a majority disenchanted with May’s “Red Toryism” – her thinly veiled rejection of Thatcherism and of “untrammelled free markets”. But it was the tone of the Tory campaign that was most offputting, said Matthew Parris in the Times. Why did it have to be so shrill? The silly slogans and the personal attacks on Corbyn have so irritated voters that they now say they “might actually send to Downing Street a man they’ve already told pollsters they don’t think is up to the job”. Or maybe people just changed their minds about Corbyn, said Louis Staples in The Independent. I have. Before, he struck me as an “unsure, inconsistent” liability. But his performance on the stump suggests an altogether smarter politician. Instead of being “sucked into an endless battle of sound bites over Brexit”, he played to his strengths, banging the drum for better public services and housing.

Corbyn’s trump card was his promise to deliver better services without increasing most people’s taxes, said John Curtice in The Daily Telegraph, whereas May confronted the electorate with problems it was going to have to face. That was a canny strategy for a man who’d been written off as one of the most unpopular leaders in polling history. Corbyn has also been able to project an image of “humour, modesty and sincerity”, said Charles Moore in the same paper, a vital advantage in an age where “authenticity” is the quality voters now tend to look for in a politician, be it Donald Trump on the Right, or Greece’s PM, Alexis Tsipras, on the Left. In the hard times since the credit crunch, voters are increasingly rejecting the established authorities in favour of new prophets. Only later do they discover that the prophets turn out to be false ones.

The Conservatives have raised far more money than any other party in the run-up to this election. Total fundraising for the campaign is not yet known, but the most recent figures show that the party has been given £15.2m since January 2017; Labour, by contrast, has received £8.1m. In the week after 17 May, the Tories raised £3.77m in large donations (those of more than £7,500), dwarfing Labour’s £331,499 large donation haul, and the Lib Dems’ £310,500. Big Tory donors during this campaign include theatre producer John Gore, who gave £1.05m, and hedge fund founder John Armitage, who gave £500,000. Almost all of Labour’s big donations came from unions, while the Lib Dems received £230,000 from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. Only the Tories are expected to come close to the campaign spending limit of £19.5m.