General Election 2017: 1 Week To Go
Oh, Theresa. . . Theresa, Theresa, Theresa. Put whatever local cuisine you’re pretending to like down, go find the Think Tank or aides who told you it was a good idea to call a snap election and punch them. Punch them repeatedly. Do it, Theresa. It will help with the despair.
It’s been a car-crash. Though still favourite to regain the keys to number 10, Theresa May’s government has conceded 17 percentage points in the polls in just a few weeks, and it has been depressingly hilarious to watch. This was supposed to be a vehicle to show her as the incumbent you can trust. The strong and stable leader that will have a crushing mandate to take the Brussels and shove in Junker’s bespectacled face. The master tactician, the ultimate political operator. The Iron Lady 2; and this time she’s made of adamantium!
What has happened instead has been a capitulation of biblical proportions, and no matter what the result next Thursday, Theresa May and her supporting characters will come out of it looking much worse in the eyes of the world. If the Tories win, Brussels has nothing to worry about.
When a former Conservative chancellor, one that was in the job less than a year ago, is calling your manifesto “the most disastrous in recent history” through his newspaper, you know you’re in trouble. And, yes, the cacophony of grinding axes is deafening, but George Osborne may have a point.
When this election was announced, the Conservatives were genuinely debating whether to put out a manifesto at all. They thought that they had enough capitol with the public to simply say “trust us”. They didn’t. So they hastily scrabbled together a mixture of rehashed promises from 2015, ones that weren’t yet fulfilled, and a bunch of Ed Miliband era Labour policies that the country had rejected 2 years ago, policies that the then conservative party slammed as being dangerously left-wing.
What were they thinking? The whole point of calling a snap election, surely, is that you’re prepared and your opponents are not. And, far be it for me to suggest lying and u-turning, but maybe wait until after you’re in power to implement crippling cuts on social care that will mostly affect your core voting base? You do it all the time anyway, why not just lie about your social care bill on your manifesto, and change your mind later? Schoolboy error.
On top of it all, they didn’t even bother to cost any of their pledges. Suddenly the argument about Labour being unable to afford there manifesto falls flat, as all the journalist needs to ask is “how do you plan to pay for yours?”
Throw into the mix Theresa May’s unwillingness to debate anybody, not even members of the public, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. She won’t commit to anything either, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious just how out of her depth she is.
Look at this video. She’s basically becoming Nicola Murray from The Thick Of It, complete with the fake laugh at her own bad joke:
And look at this transcript from an interview with a local paper in Plymouth. It reads like a parody:
Theresa May's interview with the Plymouth Herald: https://t.co/Q3yk5r4uFB pic.twitter.com/P0ZkQu94Ho
— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) 1 June 2017
It’s always harder to defend a record in an election. Cameron scraped by in the last one by insisting they were still cleaning up Labour’s mess, helpfully aided by Ed Miliband continuously admitting as much. That wasn’t going to fly this time, and the Conservative record, especially when it comes to the success of austerity measures, has been pretty awful. I still think the public would feel more reassured if May actually defended it, though. By refusing to debate it suggests she is ashamed of what they have done in the last 7 years.
Kudos has to go to Jeremy Corbyn, obviously. Even his strongest critics have to admit he’s carried himself pretty well throughout this campaign. Next to the malfunctioning opportunist he is contesting against, he looks like a normal human man, and that goes surprisingly far in some circles. His manifesto, which may over-promise in certain areas, isn’t the communist dirt-sheet most pundits thought it would be, and he has won over a lot of people. Questions remain about his ability to lead, but in policy and appearance he has come across strongly.
As for the mess the Conservatives find themselves in; is it incompetence? Over-confidence? Has the Ozzy pitbull Lynton Crosby totally lost his touch? There is a week to go for Theresa May, Boris, Hammond and Rudd to turn things around in an election where anything less than an increased majority has to be considered a colossal failure, considering where they started.