Enda’s election flop should have been a red alert for Theresa May

Tory advisers told Fine Gael to stick with ‘strong and stable’ message. That plan didn’t go so well…

BE CAREFUL what you wish for. As he ponders the British poll results this weekend, our incoming taoiseach Leo Varadkar will surely allow himself a wry smile at Theresa May’s disastrous decision to call a needless election.

He will know that one of the main lessons of the election is that voters often punish governments for forcing them to go to the voting booths when there really is no need. This is particularly the case when the length of time between elections is relatively short, barely two years in the British case.

Varadkar will also know that campaigns matter. It was often thought that campaigns had very little relevance for voting outcomes. In the mainly twoparty British system, the received wisdom over the last 40 years was that the voters would plump for either the Conservatives or Labour for a number of elections, get sick of them after a decade or so and then turf them out and give the other crowd a go. This was facilitated by the first-past-thepost electoral system.

Hence the Tory victories in 1979, ’83, ’87 and ’92 and the Labour victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005. This pattern seemed to be replicating itself again with the Tory victory in 2015 coming after it returned to power in 2010 when it had to coalesce with the Liberal Democrats. The 2017 election, the theory went, would see the Tories gain a massive majority, setting them up to govern for another decade.

Then the campaign got in the way. To be blunt, May ran the worst campaign in modern electoral history. There is no historical parallel in Britain or anywhere else in western Europe of an incumbent government with a 24-point lead at the beginning of a campaign losing their majority.

May’s ‘strong and stable leadership’ campaign made Enda Kenny’s ‘keep the recovery going’ seem like a masterclass of electioneering – and we all know how that worked out.

It is also worth remembering that Fine Gael brought the Tories in to help them with that 2016 campaign.

The Tory advice to Fine Gael headquarters last year was to stay on message even when the Blueshirt footsoldiers told them that the ‘keep the recovery going’ mantra was going down like a lead balloon on the campaign trail.

The Tories have never been too interested in the history of Ireland or in our politics. They should be.

A cursory glance at how the Tory advice to Fine Gael worked out last year should have set warning bells ringing in Conservative head office when the ‘strong and stable leadership’ slogan and the presidentialstyle emphasis on Theresa May bored the British public within the first two weeks of the campaign.

ANOTHER lesson of both the Irish and British general elections is that people need a positive vision for which to vote. May explicitly went to the people to give her an increased mandate to negotiate and ultimately deliver the hard Brexit that she boxed herself into since she took the Tory leadership from the great boy lost of British politics, David Cameron, another politician seduced by the prospect of getting a mandate from the people when he had no need to.

The British people have rejected that vision. The result is not only a defeat of disastrous proportions for the Conservatives in light of their expectations, but the end of May’s political career.

While she wrapped up a deal pretty quickly with the DUP, the reality is that every Tory in Britain knows she cannot lead her party into another general election.

With the twin difficulties of negotiating Brexit with a reduced mandate and a waferthin majority in the House of Commons predicated on the support of a party from a province that May and pretty much every other Tory has no interest in, her days as prime minister are numbered.

In her public statement on Friday she had the air of someone who had magically airbrushed the election out of existence. It won’t wash internally within the Tory party and it won’t wash with the British public.

Or as George Osborne, the former chancellor of the exchequer and now editor of the London Evening Standard, put it on that paper’s front page on Friday, as he deliciously twisted the knife: ‘Queen of Denial.’

The mistake May and the Tories made was to dramatically underestimate both Jeremy Corbyn and the message he propagated.

The Labour resurrection mirrors that of Fianna Fáil in 2016. Corbyn and Micheál Martin, very different politicians, resonated with their respective publics by rejecting austerity and espousing a message of fairness and hope: a ‘Britain for the many, not the few’ and an ‘Ireland for all’, as the Labour and Fianna Fáil slogans had it.

It’s easy to do if you have no expectation of government and don’t have to make hard decisions about taxing and spending from the limited public purse. Moreover, Corbyn is not the hard-left reincarnation of Tony Blair. He still presides over a split party, had some excruciating moments on the campaign trail where he couldn’t remember his figures or plain and simply got them wrong, and he continues to give the impression that he’s not very interested in governing.

YET Corbyn came across as honest, sincere and as a leader who actually had a vision for the country, and was prepared to debate it. This was the polar opposite of May, who changed tack at the first sign of difficulty over the dementia tax, sounded like an automaton with a vocabulary of just four words, and refused to debate with the opposition. The result is a Britain divided – and not just about Brexit, but about how the nation goes forward and what it stands for.

That division manifests itself explicitly in the westernmost part of the union. Politics in Northern Ireland has never been so polarised.

The SDLP and the UUP are barely on life support. Sinn Féin has colonised the nationalist vote and we can expect that its share of that vote will increase. The same goes for the DUP and unionism – and it will be particularly emboldened now that the party is in government with the Tories.

While Leo Varadkar has never shown much interest in Northern Ireland, the same could be said for Albert Reynolds when he became taoiseach 25 years ago. Brexit, the DUP’s central role in British government and the failure to restore the Stormont Assembly means Northern Ireland will be constantly on Varadkar’s agenda.

It might not have been what he wished for, but that will be his political reality as he takes office next week.

Corbyn isn’t the hard-left reincarnation of Tony Blair