Tories sweeping to victory... then the reckoning will come
Theresa May’s trip to Brackla Community Centre in Bridgend revealed how the Conservatives will fight the election, says Chief Reporter Martin Shipton
“STRONG and stable leadership in the national interest” is not the snappiest of election slogans but it will probably do for Theresa May.
The message, inscribed on placards with a blue background, was waved for the benefit of TV cameras by a late-middle-aged army of prosperous Tory activists whose time has well and truly come.
Few of them will have thought it possible that their party was in line to capture as many as 10 Welsh seats that have been held by Labour for decades. But that’s what they are currently able to contemplate.
If the fans of Jeremy Corbyn who attended his rally at Whitchurch Common in Cardiff last Friday are largely from the alternative middle class – public sector professionals who sympathise with those worse off than themselves – Mrs May’s supporters at her Bridgend speech were overwhelmingly from the real middle class, with a vested interest in keeping the social order as it is.
While Mr Corbyn launched into a wide-ranging series of attacks on the injustices besetting a succession of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, Mrs May had a simple message to convey: a vote for her would strengthen the UK’s negotiating hand at the forthcoming Brexit negotiations with the EU. Not voting for her would see Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street at the head of a “coalition of chaos”.
Her speech in Bridgend – not too long for the ageing audience, who had no seats to rest on – contained what is by now a ritual reference to Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon as a pantomime villain, with a slight pause for hisses. It’s a tactic that worked well for the Conservatives in 2015, when Ed Miliband was portrayed in Alex Salmond’s pocket.
Calling a general election for June 8 was a masterstroke. The Conservatives are at the height of their popularity, with Labour unelectable, Ukip on the slide, and a message to convey that warms the hearts of British nationalists. Everyone who buys into it can help make Britain stronger by voting Conservative and strengthening the UK negotiating position in Brexit talks that will begin after Mrs May’s likely landslide victory in June. Every vote counts, she told them – and you could see in their faces that they not only wanted to believe it but actually did so.
Except that it won’t strengthen our negotiating position one iota – as was made clear at the weekend by Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator.
Writing in the Observer, he stated: “The theory espoused by some, that Theresa May is calling a general election on Brexit in order to secure a better deal with the EU, is nonsensical.
“We can only conclude that many British politicians and the media still don’t fathom how article 50 will work in practice. Will the election of more Tory MPs give Theresa May a greater chance of securing a better Brexit deal? For those sitting around the table in Brussels, this is an irrelevance.”
But for those in Theresa May’s camp, it’s Mr Verhofstadt and his fellow negotiators who are an irrelevance. They don’t mean it when they say that the deal Britain ends up with will be worse than the one we’ve already got.
When he warns that “unless the UK Government requests transitional arrangements to the contrary, and these requests are agreed by all EU countries, UK citizens will have no more of a right to holiday, travel and study in EU countries than tourists from Moscow or students from Mumbai”, he is, of course, bluffing.
Those who applauded Mrs May in Bridgend yesterday, and those in their millions who continue to believe that even a hard Brexit would not damage the UK’s economy, will see her as the embodiment of strong and stable leadership in the national interest, and will vote for her with pride. Theirs is a vote for a nostalgic version of Britain before it became a multiracial country but when it ruled a multitude of races in its overseas empire.
For the moment, their version of political reality remains intact – and contagious. It will almost certainly sweep the Conservatives to a landslide victory that will exceed the achievement of Margaret Thatcher in her post-Falklands triumph over Michael Foot’s Labour Party in 1983.
But then the reckoning will come. When Brexit negotiations begin, with Britain’s divorce bill top of the agenda, the ragged nature of our negotiating position is likely to become rapidly apparent and Mrs May’s popularity will start to decline.