15 June 2017
Gone Fishing?
Mrs May still at her post
by J.R.Thomas
It’s that David Cameron I blame. And Ed Miliband. Instant resignations must be wonderfully healing for those who do the resigning, but for those who have to go on steering the machine, they just create a monstrous mess, another layer of problems left behind by electoral defeat. Alec Douglas-Home did not step down in a huff when he lost to Mr Wilson in 1964; he carried on, to enable the Conservative Party to examine itself and try and learn what had gone wrong, and to select a new and democratically chosen leader.
Even Ted Heath, the huffmeister himself, carried on as leader after the 1974 defeat to enable the party to perform a similar self-examination (although probably fortified by the Heath certainty that he was right and everybody else was wrong). Maybe we should really blame Gordon Brown (also a man convinced that at all times and in all ways he has always been right) who having returned the keys to Downing Street also instantly gave up as leader of the Labour Party, leaving poor Harriet Harman to manage that particular mess.
Mrs May apparently also decided to follow the instant Pickfords option on Friday morning but was dissuaded from it by the various men in grey suits who sought to give her advice following the shock of her defeat (or non-shock, for those following the opinion polls, which we will come back to in a moment). Instead, she sacrificed her two closest advisors, Christopher Timothy and Fiona Hill, and promised a more open and consultative form of ministry. That has saved her for the short term, not least whilst the Conservative Party tries to work out who might follow her, all of the obvious candidates having as many points against as for, it would seem. Also, those obvious candidates may be musing, given what has to be done in the next few weeks, that there are a lot of advantages in letting Theresa do it. If she gets things right, or luck runs her way, fine and she will be gone before 2022. If she fails, she can be sacrificed any time.
Her immediate task is fishing for support in Celtic waters, not that either Ruth Davidson of the proudly independent Scottish Conservative Party or Arlene Foster of the Ulster DUP would consider themselves Celts. Both are key to the ability of a May government to carry on, in particular to proceed into the Brexit negotiating room. Ms Foster is playing her cards close to her chest and Ms Davidson is playing hers rather noisily, but no doubt both will in the end fall into line as they will not want to precipitate another early election, Ms Davidson in particular.
Those Tories who now think they have Mrs May where they want her might keep a careful eye on the lady though. She was undoubtedly very shocked by the results on Thursday night, and her distress was touching – and was no doubt what led to a stumbling performance on Friday morning where she forgot to thank supporters or apologise to the newly dispossessed. But she now appears to have recovered her mojo and whilst, sensibly, she has made minimal changes to her cabinet, she has made a number of key appointments – in particular the appointment of Gavin Barwell as her chief of staff and Damian Green as, effectively, deputy Prime Minister – that will give her some comfort and protection against the plotting which now must be underway. On Monday she walked into a meeting of the 1922 Committee, which consists of all Conservative MPs, to a very muted reception, but after a thoughtful and apologetic speech walked out to reasonably rousing acclamation. It does her no harm that Mr Osborne, not one of life’s instant quitters (Mrs May fired him) has seemingly now cast himself as Sir Jasper, the archetypal pantomime villain. Having run a pretty anti-Tory campaign from the Evening Standard which he edits, and cackled his way through the ITV election night programme as the Tory disaster became apparent, he rounded up by calling Mrs May a “dead woman walking”. She does not seem to be deceased just yet, but at least “Sir Jasper” Osborne has given his former party a villain to unite against – himself.
Which by no means brings us back to the performance of the opinion polls, but there we must now go. It is of course the popular media’s constant cry that the opinion pollsters got it wrong. Well, they didn’t. They got it right, and they did so from the beginning to the end. There are always the odd rogue polls of course, and even in the last days there were a couple that showed Conservative support recovering from what looked like a hung parliament a week or so before polling date. Why polls should differ significantly is not always clear, but it is usually a result of inbuilt flaws in the poll methodology – telephone polling biased towards people who have phones was always a classic, but even polling at certain times of day may induce unconscious bias, simply because certain types of voters (shift workers, party animals) may be not available. But overall the polls got it right, and what they tell is of that initial significant lead, but then Labour slowly catching up and the minor parties being squashed. Then came the mis-step on the dementia tax, and the subsequent U turn, and suddenly Mrs M had lost her affections among the voters. This was coupled, one suspects, with a growing dislike of a negative Tory campaign focused on the personality of Mr Corbyn, who was confounding the extreme attacks by simply going round being amiable and nice and rather human (and keeping John MacDonnell mostly out of sight).
The opinion polls can only report what people tell them; as we have said here before they can compensate for those who are fibbers or secretive. But the largest imponderable, from a pollster’s point of view, is those who will actually turn out on the day. The detailed analysis is yet to be done – and it will take a while – but what was feeding back on the day and has been confirmed since is that turnout among the young was unprecedentedly high – around 75% of those eligible it is said. And also that turnout among the old was unusually low – that dementia tax faux pas really did some damage. As young people tend to lean left and old people incline right, that is not good for the Conservatives. Why did young people suddenly turn out and vote? Some reasons might be trite – students are mostly finished with exams, the weather was clement, Mr Corbyn has beard appeal. Mr Corbyn promised not just beard but also bread, and many circuses; his past was less of an issue to those who weren’t there, who don’t remember the IRA and think the Palestinians a cause worthy of support. Meanwhile, Mrs May’s Brexit did not sell well and her economics were difficult to understand but involved seemingly endless tightening of belts.
And one more thing. Or rather, two million more things. Both sides in the Referendum made huge attempts to sign up those who had never voted before, especially the young. They were wildly successful – two million new voters registered to vote in the six months before the Referendum. Many of them were young, and in that odd way the young often are, idealistic. They probably mostly voted “Remain”. And having got the voting habit, they turned out again, and probably mostly for the Love Anti-establishment Beards Open-wallets Unilateralism and Radicalism Party.
It seems most unlikely that this government will run its full course (though the Fixed Term Parliaments Act may help it do so). So, the question for the Conservatives is can they recapture enough of their core vote to scramble back next time – or at least persuade Labour to fall back into civil war and the Lib-Dems to steal some votes from them to let the Conservatives through the middle. Remember; Mrs May attracted a larger Conservative vote than they have polled for over thirty years. That’s not a bad place to start from for next time.
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