London—Theresa May has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Britain’s general election. By 5:00 a.m. EST, with 649 of 650 seats having declared, Britain looks set for a hung parliament. May’s Conservatives have won 318 seats—6 short of the 326 needed for a majority, and 21 seats less than they started with. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party has won 261.
May chose to call yesterday’s election in order to increase her parliamentary majority, and secure an electoral mandate in Brexit negotiations. Instead, the election has produced instability in the short term and uncertainty in the long term. It is simply a catastrophe for May and the Conservatives. And with Brexit negotiations meant to begin in Brussels in just over a week’s time, it is bad news for Britain: The pound slid against the dollar and the euro last night.
May entered 10 Downing Street in July 2016 as David Cameron’s heir. If she had served out the remainder of Cameron’s five-year term, she would have had to go to the polls in 2019. After taking office, she ruled out a snap election several times. But then she called one anyway. It seemed like a good idea at the time. She was high in the polls. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, who combines the manners of a provincial librarian with the ethics of a Stalinist hit-man, was so far to the left that he made Bernie Sanders look like Ronald Reagan.
May wanted to enter Brexit negotiations with a substantial parliamentary majority—substantial enough to face the E.U. negotiators in Brussels and also silence the Europhile Tories at her back. She wanted to add the voters’ endorsement to that of the Conservative party, whose leadership contest she won after David Cameron’s resignation. And she wanted to extend the period for Brexit negotiations. Had she won, she would not have needed to call another election until 2022.
The election still seemed like a good idea when the six-week campaign season began in late April. One poll showed May 24 points ahead of Corbyn, and headed for a landslide victory that would give the Conservatives a 100-seat majority. It still seemed like a good idea two weeks’ ago, when another poll gave May a “satisfaction” rating of +24—higher than any incumbent prime minister in British political history. Corbyn, meanwhile, had a rating of -40, one of the lowest ever.
Even as the British TV networks took their exit polls, the pro-Labour Guardian and the pro-Tory Telegraph both cited a poll that put May 11 points ahead of Corbyn, and set to add a respectable 50 seats to her majority. Only when the exit polls were announced Thursday night did it become clear that the snap election was a terrible idea—worse, even, than Cameron’s decision to call the Brexit referendum and then pick the losing side. At least the referendum produced a clear verdict. May wanted a mandate. Instead, she has reproduced the divisions of Brexit in parliamentary form, and got chaos.
What went wrong? Everything: the grand strategy, the policies, the personalities. In the Brexit referendum and in recent by-elections, traditional Labour voters in the north of England had shown signs of defecting to UKIP and the Tories. May’s team tried to create a permanent Tory bridgehead in this working-class Labour territory. The Conservative vote there rose, but not high enough to win seats. Like Hillary Clinton, Theresa May has lost an election she should have won—though not, as Clinton did, by neglecting key working-class constituencies, but by focusing on them too much.
On policy, May’s campaign made a number of U-turns that undermined her talk of competence, toughness, and stability. A proposal to replace free lunches in state schools with free breakfasts alienated low-income voters. Solid middle-class Conservatives were appalled by the suggestion of a “dementia tax,” which would effectively force them to cover the cost of old age care by selling their most valuable legacy, their homes. Neither fiasco convinced this season’s key electoral segment, the “JAMs” (voters who are “just about managing”) that May knew what she was doing.
The terrorist attacks in Manchester and London focused attention on May’s unimpressive record at the Home Office, too. They also forced her to attempt spontaneity. Which, for her, was a mistake: Witness her ill-judged and alarming promise to “rip up” Britain’s human rights’ laws in order to augment counterterrorism efforts.
The more the voters saw of Theresa May, the less they liked her. It became clear that she wasn’t a second Thatcher, a “bloody difficult woman.” She wasn’t even a second John Major, chosen to unify a party divided over Europe, and able to use a lukewarm common touch to win an election. She was another Edward Heath—cold, incompetent, and not as popular as she thought.
In 1974, Heath, who had led Britain into the European Economic Community, called an election in order to bolster his mandate. He lost, called another election, and then lost again, allowing the most left-wing Labour government since Clement Attlee’s to take office. The way things are going, we may yet see a second election before the year is out. And Jeremy Corbyn and his “coalition of chaos” may even win it.
On Thursday night, May insisted that if the Conservatives had the largest number of seats, and also the largest number of votes, then she would continue in office. The Conservative vote is up. The party took 44 percent of the national vote—as much as the landslides of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. But this is not enough, because British politics is no longer a two-party affair. If the Scottish Nationalists had not lost 15 seats, then Jeremy Corbyn would have been within reach of a technical majority, with Labour supported by the Scottish Nationalists, the Liberal Democrats, the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, and the solitary Green party MP.
British law obliges May to try to form a minority government. The support of the Conservatives’ old allies, the Unionist MPs of Northern Ireland, will push her over the 326-seat majority. But this will only prolong her death agony. She cannot continue as party leader after this disaster. She campaigned on competence and has been rejected. She cannot “just about manage.” She should resign as soon as possible.
The knives are already out. Ex-chancellor George Osborne, fired by May last year, was notably quick on the draw on election night. Corbyn, in a rare moment of clarity, called for May to resign, and for Britain to have “a government that is truly representative of this country.” And the knight in shining barnet is waiting in the wings—the wild-haired Boris Johnson, who led the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum, but was then ambushed by his fellow Conservative and Brexit ally Michael Gove.
This is the third time in three years that the British voters have confounded the pollsters. In 2015, they gave David Cameron an unexpected majority. In 2016, they voted for Brexit, and forced Cameron to fall on his sword. And now they have defeated a prime minister who began an election campaign in a position of unprecedented strength, and promised to carry out the Brexit for which they had voted less than a year earlier.
The mood of Britain’s voters resembles that of the voters in other Western democracies. They are angry about globalization, fearful of Islam and immigration, and worried about money and their children’s futures. They are more than happy to accept a foolishly timed invitation to poke their leaders in the eye.
The Conservatives must now conduct a leadership struggle while leading a minority government and attempting to negotiate Brexit and Britain’s future. This disastrous position will shortly afford the voters a chance to poke their alleged betters in the eye once more. Politics is supposed to be the art of the possible. But after this morning’s result, the impossible—a Britain led by Jeremy Corbyn—seems all too possible.
