DOMINIC LAWSON: I'm no betting man, but my money's already on spend, spend, spend Boris Johnson to lay the ghost of 2017
By
Dominic Lawson for the Daily Mail
4 November 2019
Strange things, election opinion polls. Take the one conducted by Opinium, published yesterday.
It had the Conservatives at 42 per cent, Labour at 26 per cent, the
Lib Dems at 16 per cent and the
Brexit Party (hello, Nigel) at 9 per cent.
If this were to be the actual outcome in terms of party vote shares on December 12, it would produce — according to the website Electoral Calculus — a colossal parliamentary majority for the Tories: they would win around 200 more seats than all the other parties combined.
Boris Johnson seems to be spending more time being filmed in NHS hospitals than anywhere else. And, when doing so, he exudes energy, optimism and bonhomie. This is the essence of his electoral appeal, which reaches beyond party affiliations
Yet the same opinion poll, by the same firm, among the same respondents, records only 22 per cent believing that the Tories will be able to get any sort of parliamentary majority. As I say, strange.
Well, perhaps not that strange: individual voters know what they think, but they don’t know what everyone else is thinking.
But what everyone does know is that the Tories went into the 2017 election with a similarly stonking lead over Labour, yet by the end of that campaign the gap had narrowed to 2.5 points — and Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority.
Her authority was permanently shattered. From that moment, as the sacked former Chancellor George Osborne cruelly but correctly observed when the completely unexpected result came in, she was ‘a dead woman walking’.
Potent
That debacle still traumatises the Conservative Party, which is why a number of Cabinet ministers were unhappy with Boris Johnson’s decision to call for a December election before getting his withdrawal deal with the European Union onto the statute book (and thereby allowing a window of opportunity for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party).
They mutter that Johnson is taking a ‘great risk’ and that the path to a parliamentary majority is ‘very narrow’.
Election manifestos are best seen as offers to the public — and Boris Johnson is Santa to Mrs May’s Scrooge. It’s spend, spend, spend — on more police, more hospitals and more school places. Johnson is pictured visiting Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge last week
To which I would respond that no election is without risk, and that the Conservatives don’t have a parliamentary majority as things stand.
In fact, this was the campaign that Johnson’s advisor, Dominic Cummings, had intended from the moment he entered Downing Street, along with a group of the best and brightest from the Vote Leave team he had recruited for the 2016 referendum.
And now that the Prime Minister has defied the doubters by negotiating a new withdrawal deal from the EU — stripped of the dreaded UK-wide ‘backstop’ that threatened to keep us in the Customs Union indefinitely — the slogan Get Brexit Done will be potent on the doorstep.
Which cannot be said for Labour’s message: ‘Vote for us and we will negotiate yet another deal with Brussels which we will put to a second referendum, in which we may or may not support our own deal: we’ll let you know nearer the time, whenever that is.’
Jeremy Corbyn, it is true, has his own adoring fan club. But I doubt he will recapture the support he generated towards the end of the 2017 election campaign. That sense of well-meaning political innocence has gone
Compared to that, the Liberal Democrats’ ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ is a model of clarity, if not of good taste.
It is true that in the 2017 election, Labour did remarkably well by adopting a form of studied ambiguity — some would call it two-faced.
In its Brexit-supporting Northern heartlands, it campaigned on a platform of honouring the result of the 2016 referendum.
In more metropolitan areas, it avoided discussing the matter altogether. But now that we are in what football fans would call ‘Fergie time’ (the clock has almost run down), Brexit cannot be evaded with a side-step.
Another difference between 2017 and 2019 is that the Conservatives are exhibiting not a shred of the complacency of two and a half years ago.
That complacency — born of a belief that it was simply a matter of how much they would increase their majority against a Labour leader written off as a crackpot Communist — produced a manifesto which might have been designed to repel millions of voters.
In 2017, despite the dreadfulness of their campaign, May’s Tories got 42.4 per cent of the popular vote — the party’s highest share since Mrs Thatcher’s crushing of Michael Foot’s Labour in the post-Falklands War election of 1983
A chance for MPs to repeal the fox hunting ban was promised. The so–called ‘pension triple lock’ would be abandoned. So would the universal winter fuel allowance.
And homeowners would be asked to contribute an uncapped amount of the value of their property towards their social care in old age. This was at once dubbed ‘the dementia tax’ by an incredulously grateful Labour campaign.
Within days of that manifesto launch, a clearly bewildered Theresa May rewrote her social care policy, while angrily declaring (to universal ridicule) ‘nothing has changed’.
In fact, all her proposed fiscal measures were defensible on budgetary grounds. It was a continuation of ‘austerity’ in the long-term cause of restoring the nation’s balance sheet.
Ditched
Election manifestos are best seen as offers to the public — and Boris Johnson is Santa to Mrs May’s Scrooge. It’s spend, spend, spend — on more police, more hospitals and more school places.
As Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, observes: ‘You’d struggle to reconcile the actions of the Conservative Party now in government with the one that put its 2017 manifesto before the people. Any idea of budget surplus has been well and truly ditched.’
But this is absolutely consistent. Consistent, that is, with the Cummings/Johnson strategy of attracting traditional Labour voters — specifically the five million of them who are thought to have voted Leave in the 2016 Referendum.
It is straight out of the war-book of that campaign, in which Vote Leave chose Labour red as the colour of its logo and declared that exiting the EU would allow billions more to be spent on the NHS instead of dues to Brussels.
What everyone does know is that the Tories went into the 2017 election with a similarly stonking lead over Labour, yet by the end of that campaign the gap had narrowed to 2.5 points — and Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority
That is why Johnson seems to be spending more time being filmed in NHS hospitals than anywhere else. And, when doing so, he exudes energy, optimism and bonhomie.
This is the essence of his electoral appeal, which reaches beyond party affiliations.
An American friend with long political experience, now living in London, told me Johnson’s style reminded her of the eternally sunny Ronald Reagan, who was unprecedentedly successful at getting long-time Democrats to vote Republican.
Indeed, the very fact that Johnson is so often referred to simply as ‘Boris’ is a sign that he appeals in a uniquely personal way, transcending normal politics.
Or as Katie Perrior, who worked for Johnson on his London mayoral campaigns, told the Sunday Times yesterday: ‘There is no other politician alive who attracts the same kind of reaction … on addressing a crowd in Romford, Essex, from the back of our campaign bus, Boris was interrupted by a topless man drinking from a can of Stella shouting: “Boris, you’re a c***, but I still loves ya!” ’
This was the campaign that Johnson’s advisor, Dominic Cummings, had intended from the moment he entered Downing Street, along with a group of the best and brightest from the Vote Leave team he had recruited for the 2016 referendum. Cummings is pictured leaving his London home last week
Disgraced
Jeremy Corbyn, it is true, has his own adoring fan club. But I doubt he will recapture the support he generated towards the end of the 2017 election campaign. That sense of well-meaning political innocence has gone.
Under his decayed leadership, the Labour Party is now disgraced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s decision to investigate it for anti-Semitism within its ranks.
Bear in mind that the key to an overall majority for the Conservatives is not its absolute level of support, as much as the margin between it and Labour.
(So the ORB International poll in Saturday’s Telegraph showing the Tories ‘only’ eight points ahead of Labour — by 36 per cent to 28 per cent — would still produce a comfortable parliamentary majority.)
In 2017, despite the dreadfulness of their campaign, May’s Tories got 42.4 per cent of the popular vote — the party’s highest share since Mrs Thatcher’s crushing of Michael Foot’s Labour in the post-Falklands War election of 1983.
The difference was that while Foot never rose in the polls, in 2017 Corbyn’s Labour seized ever more market share from the Liberal Democrats, whose evangelical Christian leader, Tim Farron, was floundering over which forms of sexual intercourse were theologically permissible.
Even while the Tories remained steady in the polls, Corbyn’s Labour came up fast on the outside, like a racehorse accelerating in the final furlong — and might even have overtaken the tiring May if the campaign had lasted much longer.
But now Johnson is the horse that seems to be gaining in vigour, and Corbyn the old goer which has been ridden for one race too many.
This race has only just begun, but (though not a betting man) my money is on a win for the Tories — and by more than a short head.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/...spend-spend-Boris-Johnson-lay-ghost-2017.html
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