[As
the nation prepares to vote Thursday, few believe that the far-left Corbyn
could actually win. If he did gain the keys to Downing Street, it would rival,
and perhaps top, 2016’s Brexit vote or President Trump’s November victory for
most implausible political outcome of the past 12 months.]
By
Griff Witte
 |
|
Workers are reflected in
the window of a London betting shop Wednesday with
a display inviting
customers to place bets on the result of the general election,
with images of British
Prime Minister Theresa May and opposition
Labour Party leader
Jeremy Corbyn. (Marko Djurica/Reuters)
|
LONDON — Britain’s seven-week sprint to an
election that few expected began in April with forecasts of a landslide victory
for the Conservatives, and a Margaret Thatcher-esque grip on power as far as
the political eye could see for Prime Minister Theresa May.
It ended Wednesday in a way that no one could
have predicted — with a rattled May being heckled during one of her few and
characteristically awkward attempts to meet voters, while her once-hapless
opponent, Jeremy Corbyn, spoke to large and adoring crowds that were earning
him comparisons to Winston Churchill.
In between, the campaign was interrupted by two
mass-casualty terrorist attacks, and May’s seemingly insurmountable lead
dwindled, in at least some polls, to a few points.
As the nation prepares to vote Thursday, few
believe that the far-left Corbyn could actually win. If he did gain the keys to
Downing Street, it would rival, and perhaps top, 2016’s Brexit vote or
President Trump’s November victory for most implausible political outcome of
the past 12 months.
But even a win for May, if it’s
insufficiently convincing, could leave her seriously damaged within her own
party and hobbled going into all-important negotiations with European leaders
that will determine whether the country’s European Union exit is the success
she has promised or a grievous mistake.
“She’ll still win the election, but she’ll be
weaker for it,” said Steven Fielding, a political-science professor at the
University of Nottingham. “Jeremy Corbyn will lose the election, but he’ll be
stronger for it.”
The irony of that outcome, if it comes to
pass, will be heightened by the fact that May didn’t need to hold the vote in
the first place. With another election not due until 2020, May had repeatedly
vowed to wait until then to face the voters after coming to power last year via
a selection by her fellow Tory lawmakers.
But the temptation of her party’s more than
20-point lead over Corbyn’s Labour Party proved too great, and the normally
cautious May gambled in April by calling an early vote.
At the time, the decision was hailed by
observers as a masterstroke — one that could grow her slender parliamentary
edge into a historically large majority, giving her the sort of one-woman
authority that even Thatcher would have envied.
May would need that sort of endorsement, she
insisted in her pitch to voters, so she could stand up to her European
counterparts with the knowledge that the country was behind her. Only a strong
majority, she argued, would give her leverage to drive the best possible
bargain for Britain in the contentious talks to come.
Polls showing that voters admired her
resolute and no-nonsense persona — she vowed to be a “bloody difficult woman”
in the E.U. talks — suggested she would get what she sought.
But as the campaign has worn on, voters
appear to be less convinced that they want to hand her such sweeping control.
“Up until the campaign, events had played to
her strengths,” said Rosa Prince, author of a biography of May. “But she does
have her frailties. And campaigning seems to have brought a lot of those out.”
Among them: a need to micromanage, an
inability to be spontaneous and a distinct absence of the common touch. Her
campaign has been widely criticized for being stilted and soulless, with May
ducking debates and rarely venturing beyond the friendly confines of scripted
events with handpicked Conservative activists.
When she has, it hasn’t gone well. After a
nurse told the prime minister about the struggles of going eight years without
a raise on BBC’s “Question Time,” May didn’t bother to empathize and instead
shot back that there was “no magic money tree.”
Perhaps most damaging for May was the
decision to adopt as official Conservative policy a plan to charge senior
citizens more for social care. When the measure was derisively dubbed “the
dementia tax,” she quickly abandoned it — then denied that her position had
changed.
On Wednesday, she was heckled by butchers
during a brief visit to London’s Smithfield Market before retreating to the
safer confines of a lawn-bowling club in the countryside. There she sipped tea
with elderly Tory voters and told reporters, somewhat implausibly, that she had
“enjoyed the campaign.”
Corbyn, by contrast, has campaigned as though
he has nothing to lose — which in a way is true. His opinion ratings were
abysmal going into the election, with not even a majority of Labour’s supporters
saying they would prefer him over May as prime minister. Last year, his fellow
Labour lawmakers voted overwhelmingly that they lacked confidence in him as
party leader.
But Corbyn — for decades a bomb-throwing
backbencher known to voters primarily for his vaguely Marxist views and scruffy
beige suits — has been getting a second look as he has aggressively taken his
underdog case to the public.
In a country where campaigning is
traditionally low-key and door-to-door, the Labour leader has turned heads with
large, open-air rallies packed with enthusiastic supporters who cheer his call
for a “fairer Britain” after years of Tory austerity.
“They underestimated us, didn’t they, seven
weeks ago?” he asked one such crowd, on the streets of Glasgow. “They underestimated
the good sense of ordinary people all over Britain.”
The crowd roared.
“He’s genuinely enjoyed campaigning because
there’s no pressure on him,” Fielding said. “There’s a very obvious contrast
with May only engaging a small number of Conservative activists at an empty
storage facility on the edge of town.”
Corbyn has even managed to put May on the
defensive on an issue that had been seen as perhaps her greatest advantage:
security.
With two terrorist attacks interrupting the
campaign, May sought to capitalize by denouncing the “tolerance of extremism”
that she said persisted in some quarters in Britain — remarks that amounted to
an implicit rebuke of Corbyn, who has in the past expressed sympathy for Hamas,
Hezbollah and the Irish Republican Army.
But Corbyn quickly pivoted the debate to
police cuts that May had authorized during her six-year tenure as home
secretary, the nation’s top domestic security official.
The prime minister, he said, had tried to
protect Britain “on the cheap” — a message that fit with his anti-austerity
mantra and that resonated as details emerged of security services’ failures to
thwart the plots.
“One attack is unfortunate,” said Joe Twyman,
head of political research for the polling firm YouGov. “Two attacks is:
‘Should we have been doing more? Is the government failing us?’ ”
Twyman said the attacks — one as recent as
Saturday night — make it especially difficult to predict the outcome Thursday.
Polls have varied widely, with some showing a double-digit Tory lead and others
pegging the Conservative advantage at a single point.
What’s clear, Twyman said, is that May’s
gamble in calling the vote has hardly gone according to plan — and that could
hurt her in the long run, even if she wins.
“Questions are being asked about her that
weren’t being asked before,” he said. “Her image has taken a hit.”
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