The May experiment has failed
It wasn’t meant to be like this.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was so unelectable that Theresa May was meant to waltz back into Downing Street for five more years as Prime Minister at the head of a thumping Conservative majority. The polls told her it was true: she led Corbyn on the question of who would make the best PM by over 40% points, and the Tories led Labour in voting intention by as much as 24%. May was the new Thatcher — a popular Conservative leader that would drive the party into new terrirotry. Her campaign mirrored this, visiting Labour safe seats in an attempt to drive up the Tory victory.
In truth, May has become much more Britain’s Hillary Clinton than a new Thatcher revolutionary; winning just 318 seats and falling short of an overall majority, as in 2010, May has demonstrated that a campaign based on attacking your main opponent personally, while yourself shedding your reputation for being a strong leader is a strategy that backfired. When May should have been visited marginal Croydon, she was instead visiting the North East where the Labour vote increased and even took what few seats the Tories had in Labour’s back yard: Stockton South was painted red with James Wharton, the MP that introduced the EU Referendum Bill, the casulty.
The fault for this election blunder and the blame must of course fall at the leader’s feet. Theresa May believed repeating “Strong and Stable Leadership” in warehouses and forest cabins was enough to win a resounding Conservative majority. In the event, Theresa May ended up running a self-centric and uninspiring campaign. When Theresa May’s own personal ratings began to fall, so did the chances of a Tory landslide. The campaign became repetitive, dull and devoid of any vision beyond catchphrase and cliche. The manifesto didn’t help that: originally believed to be a blue-print of a future May-ite Conservative Party, the document was vague, ridiculed and controversial.
While Jeremy Corbyn was recruiting younger voters to his left-wing platform and also offering more spending for pensioners — protection of triple-lock and other policies — Theresa May prepared a manifesto that stripped pensioners of the guaranteed 2.5% annual rise in the state pension, and then a social care policy which at first was dubbed a “dementia tax”, before going on to make a u-turn and add a cap to the policy, even though the manifesto supposedly rejected such a notion of a cap on personal care spending. While this policy on its own would go a long way to address the problem of chornic inherited inequality and the power that comes along with it, the left managed to spin it as an attack on pensioners, and the Conservatives were left defenceless.
Even on the basic elements of the manifesto and policy ‘Theresa May’s Team’ seemed totally inept on the political implications. On the policy for free school meals, the headlines should have been that the poorest children under a Conservative Government would recieve both breakfast and lunch free. Instead, it was presented as an attack on children and the ‘snatching’ of lunches. Perhaps one of the biggest slip-ups that Theresa May did was when she declared that she was in favour of fox hunting, basically alienating the Tories’ chances in a swathe of liberal seats because, frankly, the British love animals and middle class people see it as an attack on decency. What doesn’t help is that the fox hunting line cut through to the electorate more than any attack on Jeremy Corbyn regarding his links to the IRA ever did.
What this election has proven is that Theresa May is a seriously over-rated politician (or, was, anyway) and that she pales in comparison to the campaigning style and vigour of Jeremy Corbyn and others. It has also shown the weakness of running a deeply Presidential-style campaign in a parliamentary system. But above all it vindicates figures in the Conservative Party such as Ruth Davidson who have called for a softer, more liberal approach. May’s more statist and interventionist ways have sunk faster in the Tory Party than a led balloon. This way of thinking alienated the core vote, and the focus on the “left behind” with policies that counter the values of some in metropolitan areas alienated the “already here” voters the Tories desperately needed to hold onto in cities like London, Bath and Bristol.
Ultimately, May has been proven wrong. The liberal-minded Conservatives including Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan who she has side-lined since the days of David Cameron would have managed to cut through to metropolitan seats, protecting the Conservative majority even when the prospect of a landslide disappeared. May’s issue was that her majority relied on Labour seats piling over to the Conservatives, and when Labour’s campaign on public services hit home, the chances of that happening disappeared. Along with that, the less liberal Conservatism May has endorsed left London, Bath and other seats vulnerable to both Labour and the Liberal Democrats — eroding the slender majority the Tories had.
Theresa May must now deal with the consequences of her decision to endorse this ideological message. She may aim to govern with support from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists, but this arrangement is unlikely to last for five years, regardless of whether she remains Prime Minister or not. May is damaged goods. Her experiment on the Conservtaive Party has backfired hugely in its first electoral test, and the Party and her team must now face up to that.
