What the last few weeks can teach us for future elections
Rebecca Mcquillan:
IT’S over, and it’s only just begun. The most depressing election campaign in decades has finished and now it’s time to assess the damage. Leading politicians have taken a sledgehammer to campaigning norms, creating worrying precedents for the future. Here are six things we have learned:
Being honest is less important than being visible
Did it say this on the white board in Dominic Cummings’ office? It might as well have done. Politicians have never been saints, but systematic dishonesty from the very top of a party is an innovation, and a dangerous one.
Boris Johnson was a proven liar before the campaign and where he led, the Tory campaign followed, with a doctored video of the shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer plastered all over social media and a brazen attempt by Conservative central office to hoodwink people on Twitter by posing as a fact-checking organisation.
Like complacent old colonials faced with complaining locals, senior Tories casually batted away criticism of it all. The party even briefed journalists earlier this week that a Tory aide had been punched by a Labour activist, which was a big fat lie served up with an extra helping of tripe.
The Tories may not have been the only offenders – the Libdems used misleading bar charts and the SNP had to withdraw a leaflet because of a false claim about Jo Swinson – but the Conservatives’ flagrancy has been of a different order.
We should all worry for our democracy. A rot has set in.
It is an age of political pygmies
All main UK party leaders had substantial negative approval ratings as polling opened and a Yougov survey on Wednesday found that two thirds of voters were unenthusiastic about the election.
Who can blame them? Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to apologise in his Andrew Neil interview for his handling of anti-semitism, and his feeble lie about the Queen’s Speech, were head-in-hands moments. But the spectacle of politicians hurling blame at each other following the death of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones in the London terrorist attack, was the nadir of a grim campaign. The Conservatives behaved like greyhounds out of the traps as soon as the period of campaigning purdah expired with their attempts to blame Labour (and deflect attention from their own failures).
Voters feel they deserve better. They’d be right.
Broadcasters have to get better at handling politicians
When Boris Johnson, the aforementioned serial liar, started refusing to appear on television, broadcasters were put on the spot. Channel 4 replaced Mr Johnson with an ice sculpture during their debate on climate change.
The BBC however has struggled to get it right. Like ITV, they failed to get a firm commitment from Mr Johnson at the outset of the campaign to a one-toone interview with Mr Neil. Mr Neil telling viewers the questions he would have asked Mr Johnson was effective, but not enough to reset the imbalance after other party leaders had undergone a proper interview.
On Monday night – the day Mr Johnson took a reporter’s phone off him to avoid looking at the picture of a four-year-old left on the floor of Leeds General Hospital – the Tories refused to put anyone on Newsnight, so Labour frontbencher Barry Gardiner went on alone. The Tories were then rewarded for not turning up when, in spite of Mr Johnson’s dire performance that day, the interview by Emily Maitlis became an attack on Jeremy Corbyn for not visiting enough hospitals. How can it be right to let the no-shows off and turn all the heat on those who submit to scrutiny?
Politicians are boldly testing the boundaries of the acceptable. Broadcasters must push back harder.
Boris Johnson is not a great campaigner
He was seen as the antithesis of
Theresa May but one of the campaign’s surprises has been the uncanny similarity between Mr Johnson and the Maybot.
During his encounters with the public, Mr Johnson has at times seemed just as awkward and tongue-tied and the bonhomie as forced. He seems to be regarded by his own side as even more of a liability in interviews.
Many Conservative MPS regard him as a charlatan, but voted for him as leader because of his fabled campaigning skills.
It’s lucky for them that the Brexit Party more or less collapsed itself at the outset of the campaign to help the Tories, because it’s very unlikely Mr Johnson would have achieved those poll ratings otherwise.
The two-party system in British politics is still robust
The Libdems were on 23 per cent in the polls in September and Jo Swinson dared to dream of being the next Prime Minister.
But Ms Swinson’s policy of revoking Article 50 was an unhelpful distraction and Ms Swinson herself went down poorly with voters.
This decline, coupled with the usual suffocating squeeze on the Libdems, turned the party’s dreams to dust.
The SNP may have managed to break the mould in Scotland but the Libdems will have to regroup and rethink if the two-party system is to be prised open.
Voters feel they deserve better. They are right
Christmas elections are a bad idea
A spoof ad of Love Actually must have seemed like a wizard ruse to the Tories. The rest of us thought “Oh God, no.” The idea of an ingratiating Mr Johnson using one of the most saccharine of British movies as a vehicle to bash us over the head with his misleading Brexit policy, induced the sort of dyspeptic feeling normally associated with downing an ill-advised gingerbread latte at speed while Christmas shopping.
And it wasn’t good. Mr Johnson was wisely prevented from speaking during the ad (it did feature him meeting a lone female voter) but he still managed to come over as glib and insincere in writing.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Mean Tweets fireside chat, reading out offensive remarks about himself on social media, was more easygoing and less forced, though he clearly hasn’t been reading the same Twitter feeds as me if that’s the worst he could come up with.
Thank God the campaign ended before they sullied any more of our shared festive heritage.
If Santa thinks Brexit is a good idea, we don’t want to know.