Matthew Flinders sends a note to the Prime Minister as she reflects upon the general election results and her own future. He concludes that a negative campaign, a failure to play the generation game, and over-personalisation are the factors that contributed to the GE2017 result.
Friday 9 June 2017
Dear Theresa
Sorry to bother you at what I expect is an incredibly busy time for you but I thought you might like some external reflection on what went wrong. Of course, to some extent nothing went wrong because the Conservative Party remains the largest party in the House of Commons and received the most public votes. You also did very well in Scotland and at least the UKIP vote collapsed – you also have Zac back in Richmond Park. But if the plan was to call the election in order to secure five more years in power with a larger majority then it’s hard not to conclude that your gamble failed. The question is ‘why’?
As Sir Bernard Crick once wrote ‘there are no simple answers to complex questions’ (have you read his book ‘In Defence of Politics’? – you might find it useful in terms of thinking about your next steps) but let me give you three little thoughts about what went wrong.
The first was the tone of your campaign. It was – dare I say – a tad negative, aggressive, even belligerent. Your repeated focus on the need for a ‘hard’ Brexit and your portrayal of European leaders as political predators – the enemy – just waiting to pounce may, on reflection, have been a something of an own goal. Your argument seemed to be that a vote for the Tories was a vote for the UK in terms of having a strong negotiation position and therefore (by default) placing your cross in any other box on the ballot paper was synonymous with national betrayal. The British public generally pushed back against such emotive posturing. Britain may have always been ‘an awkward partner’ in relation to its dealings with the European Union but in the twenty-first century very few people are actually anti-European in a simple black/white, in/out, hard/soft way.
The second thing that might have gone better is your party’s grasp of the political generation game. Your manifesto may have been very brave in relation to highlighting the social care crisis that will at some point have to be grasped by a future government. But in grasping that nettle within the election campaign you managed to spook that section of the electorate that were not only most likely to vote Conservative but were also most likely to actually turn out to vote – the older retired electorate. The problem was that at exactly the same time Jeremy Corbyn was able to secure the support of that section of the electorate that was most likely to vote Labour– younger voters. What’s more, he somehow managed to get the younger voters out of bed and into the ballot box.
My final thought – and I’m sorry to be so honest – is that you played the whole game too tight. I can understand why you might not have wanted to let some of your ministers loose within the campaign (but jolly well done for shackling Boris) but this may have left you somewhat isolated and therefore vulnerable. It was a highly personalised and even semi-presidential campaign focused around you rather than the Conservative Party. The battle bus for example was all about you and I think any mention of the party was limited to the petrol cap; the manifesto was very much written as a note to the public from you rather than from a larger team.
A government that relies so heavily on one person is rarely strong and stable (a phrase that came to form something of an albatross around your neck). Your decision not to appear on the televised debates left you vulnerable to accusations of disconnection, when you did appear you came across as slightly cold and robotic – never positive or energetic in terms of offering a positive vision of the future – you were never going to pass the ‘cup of coffee test’ and someone should have told you this within your team.
Oh dear! Politics is a brutal game and I can’t help but wonder what spurred your sudden decision to call an election that didn’t need to happen. But let’s look to the future and not harp back to the past!
Onwards and upwards (or somewhere)
Matt
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Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics and Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics. His latest book What Kind of Democracy is This? is published by Policy Press, 2017.
So Matt, was what you wrote in this blog ironic? : https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/why-there-was-method-in-mays-manifesto-madness
Dear Mathew,
To set the framework to my interest I have read virtually every blog posted by the LSE over the last few months in order to receive a reasoned overview of UK politics and in order to disabuse the prejudiced views expressed by the media. As I observe the political events of our time unfold I feel increasingly frustrated that the entire political scene is an utter mess and a waste of time. The word debate is used to describe the babble of nonsense increasingly emitted by the Medias and the politicians alike.
Human affaires are desperately in need of a fundamental overhaul the activity resembles that of stone age man where the shaman dragged the males of the clan into the depths of the cave, dosed them up with Datura Tea until they hallucinated, frightened them to death the told them to do exactly as he told them to and he would save them. Just what politicians do to the electorate today in effect?
It is about time that the human species behaved in a grown up way. As things stand too many of the extremely wealthy powerful and influential individuals and organisations extract enormous revenues from the populations which consume the products they sell, conceal the greater part and finance political parties in order to maintain their position of privilege and power and control over the peoples on which they feed.
Ironically in spite of this human endeavour in many sectors still succeeds in fabulous feats of excellence in science, medicine, engineering and social activity etc.
The sadness of this hegemony to which I allude is that in order to retain the positions of power and influence the benefits which should be returned to people never are. As a result politicians and governments are unable to shape policies and devise regulatory systems which ensure that the just proportion of the revenues of these extremely wealthy powerful and influential individuals and organisations is returned to the service of the people who make it all possible.
In addition to all this governments must stop the creation of harmful products such as pesticides which contaminate our foodstuffs as well as chemical compounds incorporated in the preparation of manufactured foodstuffs and equally pollutants from the exploitation of hydrocarbons for the generation of electricity and the propulsion for land, sea and air transport. All these abuses have over the last 5 decades damaged the general state of health and wellbeing of populations to the extent that our national sickness services and their doctors and nurses can no longer cope with the number of cases and the range of illnesses which can only increase if we do nothing about it.
Sadly it seems that we are incapable of doing anything about it. Virtually every aspect of public life is decaying before our very eyes. No one in public life seems to understand the fundamentals of the problem let alone do anything about it , our lives exist in a bubble of ephemerality, today’s Datura Tea as long as we have our iPhone/iPad we are oblivious to the bad going on around us, our education, our only salvation is becoming increasingly dummed down, the passed is dismissed as irrelevant as are the experiences of our elders who should be valued and heeded as history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. Finally we have now entered a cycle of increasingly abusive racialist, intolerant and dishonest behaviour and attitudes characteristics crassly exploited by politicians such as Farrage and his UKIP party who along with its invisible paymasters are hell bent on destroying all sense of control over unscrupulous enterprises to the profit of unscrupulous extremely wealthy powerful and influential individuals and organisations.
Do you think it’s possible to put things right and if so how?
Mrs May — It was nice to see you wearing blue again once the election was over. Mind you, even though you wore a red outfit during the campaign, you—and your policies—were always “blue” in my mind.