Almost There. A very strange general election campaign finally draws to a form of conclusion

We are almost at the end of what has been the strangest general election campaign of my lifetime. It has been long and felt longer. It had a set of other elections in the middle of it. It has been brutally interrupted by two major terrorist atrocities. The opinion polls have behaved in a surreal manner with those published in the Sunday newspapers reaching new levels of inconsistency. There has only ever seemed like one winner, yet that presumed winner has hardly had the best of the hustings. It started with a bang and is ending with a form of whimper. What, if anything, can be drawn from it?
The Conservatives would have been better served holding the election on 4 May, not 8 June
If the Conservative Party ends up underperforming its hopes and expectations tomorrow, then the rather bizarre choice of election date will have played quite a large part in that story. In retrospect, it would have been much more rational to have triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on or about 14 March once legal authority to do so had been awarded by Parliament, then asked the House of Commons to hold an election under the terms of the Fixed Term Parliament Act a day or so later and then held what would have been a relatively short and sharp election outing with the votes being cast on 4 May alongside the numerous other contests already scheduled for that date. With Easter being relatively late, the main campaign would have been little more than a fortnight in its duration.
That would have been a real snap election. By waiting beyond the point at which 4 May could serve as polling day, Theresa May created the circumstances in which the campaign would be too long for her own best interests. It has been impossible to sustain her chosen themes of Brexit First and the need for strength and stability for the better part of two months. The Conservative campaign thus peaked about three days after the election was called and has struggled to maintain its momentum ever since that point. The British electorate which has over the past three years witnessed a vigorous referendum campaign in Scotland, a general election in May 2015, a referendum on EU membership in June 2016, a complete change of government from David Cameron to Mrs May in July 2016 and now another general election battle has shown signs of appearing exhausted. The decision to duck a May ballot but then embrace a June one has also been highly disruptive to public administration and to the parliamentary timetable. The Queen’s Speech will be delivered on 19 June but the House of Commons is only in business for a month before it enters the summer recess on 20 July. Bar eight days in September, it will not sit again until 9 October. This means that in terms of the enacting of ordinary legislation, almost six months will have been lost from the election being called on 18 April.
Mrs May would have been better served by opting for a Rose Garden personal strategy
Mrs May is not a natural election campaigner. She has rarely looked comfortable over the past several weeks. As a result, her personal ratings have depreciated. Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, has spent his whole life on one never-ending protest rally. He has looked by far the happier of the two.
The Prime Minister has, perhaps paradoxically, appeared at her best when obliged to abandon the campaign temporarily to deal with the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. Her demeanour and her language on both occasions have actually conveyed the strength and stability that she wanted to make the hallmarks of the election. In the United States, it is not unusual for the incumbent President to campaign by not campaigning, adopting a Rose Garden strategy of visibly concentrating on their public functions and staying above the fray only occasionally speaking at campaign events but mostly delegating all that vulgar stuff to subordinates and seeking to be seen as a national, rather than a partisan, figure. One of the many virtues of this approach is that it makes the opponent of the President appear a much less substantial and more narrowly political figure. As she plainly does not enjoy pressing the flesh, Mrs May would have been better sticking to her role.
There has been a Brexit effect on this election but it has not been of the form anticipated
There have been three distinct Brexit effects in this election but none of them has been of a form that might have been anticipated. The first has been to reduce UKIP, the party that most strenuously favoured Brexit, to close to an irrelevance. The single most consistent feature of the campaign has been a very large movement of those who supported UKIP in May 2015 to the Conservatives, even though the official position of not only that party but its present as well as immediate past leader was that the UK should remain in the European Union. The reinvention of the Conservatives as the party of Leave has been as extraordinary as it has been electorally effective. The second effect has been to harm rather than assist the Liberal Democrats as they sought to make themselves the home for the 48% of the electorate who backed Remain by putting the pledge of a second referendum at the heart of their campaign efforts. It turned out that, at least for the moment, the market for this proposition is remarkably small, but by making Brexit so central to their strategy the Lib Dems appear to have driven Remain voters into the arms of a Labour Party that has no coherent Brexit position. The final impact has been in Scotland where, somewhat counter-intuitively, the Brexit effect has been to harden opposition to a second referendum and hence assist the Conservatives against the SNP (presumably because a section of the electorate north of the border has determined that Brexit involves quite enough uncertainty as it is without throwing in the further uncertainty of separation).
The economy, normally the dominant issue in UK elections, has been almost invisible this time
British elections normally focus disproportionately on issues of economic management and policy. That has not been the case on this occasion. The Conservatives have wanted to talk about Brexit. The Labour Party has sought to keep the conversation on social policy. Neither the Chancellor nor the Shadow Chancellor have had particular prominence in the course of the campaign. This outcome on economic matters has occurred despite the fact that the divisions between the two major parties on economic policy are much wider than they were in either 2015 or 2010. Labour has not wanted to talk about the details of its stance of taxation, spending and borrowing (possibly because details are a little thin on the ground), which is not that surprising, but curiously the Conservatives have not wanted to really drill in to those details either. It is as if a combination of secret concern at the rate at which the economy is slowing and the desire not to award too much attention to the fact that the date for balancing the budget has been pushed back to 2025 has led them to opt for tactical silence.
The sense that Labour has no chance of winning has been the salvation of its leader and campaign
The final and ultimate odd feature of this very, very weird election is that the sense that the Labour Party has virtually no chance of winning has been the salvation of its leader and its whole campaign. The public have in effect been told that it can safely support the Labour Party and hence sympathise with its priorities without there being any real risk that its leader will become Prime Minister or that its policies will be implemented. The media has not subjected its manifesto to anything like the sort of critical scrutiny that it would have done if they were seen as credible contenders for office. The more that sense holds tomorrow then the better the Labour Party will do. A Conservative landslide, however, requires that some voters belatedly sense that they should take a Labour victory seriously.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA