Your guide to the election hot takes
W Eall know the moment of truth. It comes, every election, at some point between the first exit polls and the last of the 4am Haribos and Moaoms.
For a fleeting few minutes, politicians are honest. And sometimes even smart.
They explain how they won or lost, or recklessly admit they actually really liked their opponent.
The same can be true of political commentators. In the wee small hours of an election morning, freed of print deadlines, newspaper columnists get to blog freestyle. Here are some of the best Friday am hot takes.
The Times
If you enjoyed last night’s election you should thank Jo Swinson, reckons Philip Collins. Not because of the drama of the Libdem leader’s late-night ousting. No, because she set the whole vote up.
“It was only when the Liberal Democrats decided to abandon the Remain alliance, which had Boris Johnson trapped in parliament, that the election he wanted became possible,” Mr Collins explained. “Now the Conservatives have won a majority sufficient to pass their withdrawal agreement, this decision will prove to have been decisive in ending the forlorn campaign for a second referendum.”
So the Libdems have not just crashed and burned. They have delivered Brexit too.
Mr Collins thought their campaign “was an audition for the centre-left force in British politics and, sadly, the party will not receive a recall”. Labour, he thought, drifted to a dysfunctional extreme. But if the Libdems can’t make space on the centre left, then who can? Labour?
“If anything living can emerge from the husks of the extant parties its source of energy will have to come, in the main, from Labour,” said Mr Collins. “It is hard to see why you would invent the Labour Party if it did not already exist,” he says. A party set up to represent a social class no longer functions in an era of identity politics.
He added: “Maybe a miracle will happen and the left will yield control of the Labour Party. It does not look likely, though, and it may be that the only forcing mechanism available is to try something new, something that has excited none of the enmities in which the Libdems, as close participants in a nasty and dismal era of British politics, are too deeply enmeshed. It is not likely but, as the closing note to a dismal passage in British politics, nothing else sounds any better.”
The Guardian
This is the paper that would no doubt love a centre-left challenge. Its web pages however are filled with the first draft of post-mortems for the workers’ party. Polly Toynbee describes Labour’s manifesto as “magnificent”.
Her praise of Labour leader
Jeremy Corbyn is less glowing. “Labour was disastrously, catastrophically bad, an agony to behold,” she wrote. “A coterie of Corbynites cared more about gripping power within the party than saving the country by winning the election.”
Its sectarian ruling executive should have ditched Mr Corbyn as “electoral arsenic” before the poll. The man himself should have been out before dawn.
“Corbyn is not an amoral man,” said Ms Toynbee. But added: “He is a man without any qualities required of a leader, mental agility, articulacy, strategy, good humour or charisma.
“Yet his legacy is of historic importance: he did this country profound, nation-splitting, irreparable harm. Had he led his party and the unions full tilt against Brexit, the narrowly lost referendum could have been won.”
Ms Toynbee stressed Mr Corbyn’s baggage.
Labour, she said, faces a long recovery from the chaos he has left.
New Statesman
There are left thinkers looking at the winners as well as the losers of the General Election.
Stephen Bush was thinking beyond that. The left-wing magazine’s editor was thinking too about the prize Boris Johnson has won. What is left of the British union after nationalists made advances in both Ireland and Scotland.
Will Boris Johnson block a second referendum on Scottish independence? Mr Bush doesn’t think so. Mr Johnson has “the constitutional power to do so: but is it sustainable for him to use that power? It doesn’t look like it from here.”
Mr Bush, unlike many commentators, clocked subtle but dramatic changes in Northern Ireland. Mr Johnson’s Brexit plans mean a frontier of sorts in the Irish Sea. Mr Bush sees this as more of a legacy of his politics than most English commentators.
He said: “But that border – which will now certainly come into being, and will create a significant barrier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK – is a threat to the future of the UK too.
“Boris Johnson occasionally likes to refer to himself as a one-nation Conservative: but the nation he presides over may end up as just two: England and Wales.”