What the commentators said
Any early election is a gamble for a sitting government, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. But as gambles go, May’s is “about the surest bet any politician could ever place”. Most polls show the Tories with a lead of around 20% over Labour ( see page 4). Polls are often unreliable, and her lead could narrow over a 50-day campaign. But even if it shrinks to 10%, she will still greatly increase her majority of 17. The real gamble would have been to “sit it out until 2020”. If she had, the election would have come the year after the completion of the Brexit deal, and after another long period of austerity – leaving her at the mercy of events.
The PM has won all her Brexit votes in the Commons easily, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. “But she has lost several battles against David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto, and this is the enemy she wishes to slay.” When she tried to increase National Insurance, the whips told her she’d lose the vote, because it contradicted the manifesto. “Expanding grammar schools, her signature reform, was unlikely to make it through Parliament for the same reason.” Her own manifesto may prove “a bonfire of Cameronism”, with the triple-lock pension and foreign aid pledges facing the axe.
Still, her chief reason for calling the election is simple, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times: Labour. “The main opposition party is going to fight this election with a leader that even many of his own MPS believe should not be prime minister.” And on the EU, the election’s central issue, it has no credible policy at all. Do they think Britain should be in the single market? That it should allow free movement of labour? I genuinely don’t know. In Downing Street, the Liberal Democrats are taken more seriously than Labour, said Rachel Sylvester in the same paper. The Lib Dems’ support for Europe has given them a “distinctive identity”. In Remain-supporting areas, such as university towns and London, they pose a real challenge to the Tories. After their “virtual annihilation” in 2015, “the only way is up”.