This morning’s calling of a snap election in Britain on June 8 strengthens Prime Minister Theresa May’s position as Brexit negotiator—and not only in her negotiations with Brussels. “At this moment of enormous national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster,” she announced on the steps of 10 Downing Street. “The country is coming together, but Westminster is not.”
May understands the division of Westminster from personal experience. She was against Brexit before she was for it. Her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, was vital to the success of the Leave campaign failed to capitalize upon David Cameron’s resignation. Instead May, like John Major in the aftermath of Mrs. Thatcher’s resignation, emerged as the candidate who could reunite the party—in other words, a temporary fix.
In 1990, Major defied this placeholder role. He signed the Maastricht Treaty, which set Britain on the path to convergence with the European Union, then won the 1992 general election with the most votes in British election history. Now, May looks set to repeat Major’s accomplishment and emerge stronger, but this time to lead Britain out of the EU.
Under the British system, if the governing party changes its leader, then the people get a new prime minister. In 1990, Major did not come to power through a general election, but through a vote of no confidence on Thatcher in the Commons, and the secret balloting of Conservative MPs. In 2007, Labour MPs replaced Tony Blair with Gordon Brown in similar fashion, though Brown failed to win the 2010 general election.
In 2016, May came to power by the same route. She faces the same problems as Major and Brown: At a moment of “enormous national significance,” May’s democratic legitimacy is not established beyond doubt. In the 650-seat Commons, May inherited from David Cameron an absolute majority of only nine seats, and has a working majority of 17. And her party remains divided, both at Westminster and against itself.
“Brexit means Brexit,” May has said. But no one really knows what Brexit means now, or what it will mean by May 2019, when the divorce of Britain from the EU is supposed to resolve by mutual agreement or, in the absence of a deal, desertion. The referendum vote was a statement of preference. May needs to face to EU’s negotiators in Brussels with a popular mandate, and with a united party at her back. An election campaign, like the court cases and parliamentary votes earlier this year, will be good for British democracy—and democratic accountability was one of the things that Brexit meant to the referendum voters of 2016.
While the voters will enter the booths on June 8 with a better idea of May’s Brexit goals, May will count the returns with a better grip on her party. The longstanding Conservative rift over Europe is not over. The party membership has always been Euroskeptic, but Europhiles constituted a majority of Conservative MPs before the 2016 referendum. The referendum tied the hands of many pro-Remain MPs. If they represent pro-Brexit constituencies but campaign as Remainers, they risk the fate of Edmund Burke, who told the voters of Bristol that it was his job to overrule them for their own good, and who consequently lost his seat in the election of 1780.
In June’s election, Brexit will be Conservative policy. May is forcing the Remainers to campaign for Brexit before their voters. This display of unity will impair her Conservative opponents, and also annul a lesser threat, the challenge of the populist right. For there is no need for a U.K. Independence Party when the independence of the U.K. is the central plank of the Conservative platform. In an indication of the solidifying of the Conservatives’ right wing, in March, UKIP’s only current MP, Douglas Carswell, defected from UKIP; he will run in June as an independent.
On current form, May will triumph in June. In Monday’s poll for the Times of London, she was ahead of Labour 43 percent to 22 percent. A governing Conservative has not been so strong in the polls since Major before the 1992 election. With that kind of lead, the Conservatives could take more than 50 seats from Labour. The party would be impregnable in the Commons—especially against the Scottish Nationalists, who oppose Brexit—and the strength of the voters’ pro-Brexit message would intimidate the Remainers in the House of Lords, too.
May is inevitably compared to Margaret Thatcher—as a power-dressing female politician, as the law-and-order daughter of a middle-class preacher, and as an Atlanticist. How obliging of the Labour Party to re-create that other fixture of the 1980s, an unelectable opposition controlled by mad Trotskyites, exotic Maoists, garden-variety Marxist-Leninists, and other fauna unlikely to take root in British politics. Labour will fail badly in June. But will it shed Jeremy Corbyn, if not recover the social democratic centrism of the Blair years?
In the 2010 election, the Liberal Democrats secured a place in a coalition government. In 2015, they crashed. They are the party of Remain. Labour will win more seats in June, but with Labour committed officially to Brexit and unofficially to civil war, the most coherent opposition voices in the next parliament will come from the Lib Dems.
Ironically, May is the first British premier to benefit from the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act of 2011. Created as part of David Cameron’s coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the Act provides for fixed parliamentary terms of five years, to avoid the opportunistic calling of snap elections. The Act can be overruled by a two-thirds majority of the Commons. On Tuesday afternoon, Jeremy Corbyn gave Labour’s support to May’s call for elections.
Ludicrously, the Guardian has called the snap election a “coup.” But the British value their lawns too highly to put tanks on them. There is nothing Erdogan-like in May’s thoroughly democratic choice of elections. Her timing is good politics; the coup, if any, will be against the doubters in her own party. And though May will emerge from the election stronger, it is not clear for how long. Though the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act would not oblige May to call another election until 2022, her sense of political timing is too keen, and the stakes too high, for her to run down the clock.
If May secures a Brexit deal from Brussels by May 2019, she will come under pressure from all sides to put the deal to the voters. If, as is possible, there is no deal by May 2019, Britain and the 27 EU states can agree to extend negotiations year by year. But May will look weaker and weaker as negotiations drag on. If, as is equally possible, May withdraws from the unfinished negotiations in May 2019, she will have to put a program for withdrawal to the voters. In all three cases, the convincing victory that May will almost certainly win in June will translate into a two-year window before the next election.
June’s snap election will augment May’s power in Westminster. It will strengthen her negotiating stance in Brussels. It may even add her name to the list of prime ministers who were returned with a landslide. Still, these will be no more than the necessary preliminaries to the real test of Theresa May’s prime ministership: the negotiation of Brexit, and the setting of a new course for Britain.
Dr. Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is a frequent contributor.
