It’s a massive roll of the dice. Lose and you will go down as one of the shortest-serving prime ministers in U.K. history. Win and you will have a mandate to break the electoral deadlock, deliver Brexit, and finish off one of the most left-wing Labour leaders in U.K. political history.
So far, Boris Johnson’s audacious gamble of calling a winter election looks like it may pay off.
At the start of the U.K. race, it looked like the country was heading for a political stalemate with a hung parliament the most likely outcome. But the story so far has been the fall of challenger parties — the Liberal Democrats and Brexit Party — both with distinct sells at different ends of the political spectrum, have failed to make a political impact. The arch-Remainer Liberal Democrats have not found their voice, sounding shrill and out of touch. Nigel Farage and the Brexit party, fearful they may kill off the very thing they campaigned for by splitting the pro-Brexit vote, has stood down from contesting hundreds of seats. Election races, of course, have the potential to be incredibly volatile, but at the moment the smart money is on a Johnson victory.
In some ways, the U.K. election race is starting to look more presidential. The first TV debates signified this by setting up a presidential format that the United Kingdom has lacked in modern times. We saw the first head-to-head debate between the leaders of the two biggest parties. The debates, however, failed to capture the public’s imagination and change the political weather. A very static format (the program only spanned one hour, including advertisement breaks) with time-limited answers, never allowed for in-depth debate. Jeremy Corbyn needed a game changer that didn’t materialize. The scrappy and forgettable affair was exactly what the Conservatives wanted.
Corbyn’s campaign has centered around attacking the boogeymen of capitalism. Just as Democratic Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, he targets the billionaire class to stir up the same type of anger as previous movements like Occupy Wall Street. But Corbyn has failed to address the elephant in the room. This is unavoidably the Brexit election. His inability to offer a clear, definitive stance on this main issue of the day has harmed him in an election where emotion trumps reason. Johnson, meanwhile, has been brutally effective on this issue. He is targeting traditional Labour constituencies that favor Brexit; parallels can be drawn to the type of blue-collar voter in the rust belt that handed Donald Trump the presidency.
Much has been made of the Johnson-Trump comparison. Even though they are actually very different characters, they are both instinctively disruptive politicians who defy the normal political conventions.
But it’s too soon for the Tories to declare victory. Labour outperformed expectations in the 2017 U.K. elections. This was largely a result of their highly effective digital campaign, whose edgy video content outsmarted the Conservatives. But the Tories have not underestimated this battleground this time. They have incorporated a robust strategy of pushing out fair but aggressive digital content, using it to bypass the media with their message. Their tactic of “uglifying” their social media content and using popular cultural references has boosted its virality.
The last time a Conservative government called a December general election was in 1923. The outcome was a Labour government. The combination of a dark, cold, wet British winter’s day, voter fatigue and the fact that current polls show Corbyn with no chance of victory may create the perfect storm for a Conservative disaster on polling day. Labour’s activist base will not be deterred by the conditions or their dire polling prospects, and Conservative complacency remains a frightening possibility.
In the 2016 U.S. election, the media continued to push the message that Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide, despite internal polling showing the race was becoming tighter than expected. Many have speculated that this may have encouraged the Democratic Party and Democratic voters to rest on their laurels. Johnson needs to ensure that Corbyn remains a plausible threat in voters’ minds so as to prevent a similar outcome.
Regardless of who forms the next British government, both parties have completely departed from their previous modern forms. A Corbyn government would seek to reverse the free-market policies of the last 30 years. A Johnson government will seek to completely re-negotiate a trading relationship that has been embedded in British life for more than 30 years.
We are living through an era of precedents. The outcome of this election will likely set a new one.
Giles Kenningham is former spokesman to the U.K. prime minister from 2013-2016 and founder of the public affairs agency Trafalgar Strategy.
