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Britain is getting used to political gamblers. David Cameron held a referendum and Theresa May hoped Brexit would allow her to steal Labour territory and win a huge majority. They both failed, and join Margaret Thatcher and John Major as the four Conservative prime ministers brought down by Europe.
Boris Johnson could be the fifth. With a majority of just one, after the resurgent Liberal Democrats triumphed at the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election last week, the word in Westminster is that either a vote of confidence will be called early next month or Johnson will push for a snap election after delivering Brexit. Either way, if he is to triumph over Europe then he, too, will need to place a bet — that he can go to the country and win big. But how?
Our politics has never been as volatile, our loyalty to the two big parties never weaker, and our willingness to switch votes never greater. A once-stable two-party system has imploded. Trying to calculate what will happen in marginal seats is virtually impossible. One irony of Brexit is that our politics is now more European: fragmented, populist, chaotic and unpredictable.
Yet it is still possible to chart some pathways. One is for Johnson to pursue a “strategy of consolidation” — to bring leavers under one roof. It is a strategy not dissimilar to Nicola Sturgeon’s in Scotland, where independence voters rallied under one flag while unionists stayed divided. Crucially,
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s new adviser and Vote Leave mastermind, knows who and where these leavers are. This involves a two-pronged mission; to cannibalise the Brexit Party vote and to target the nearly 160 pro-Brexit seats in Labour hands, including in Wales, where polls last week put the Tories first and Labour on what would be their lowest number of seats since 1918.
Johnson is already promising to “turbocharge” the north of England. “I want to be the prime minister who does with Northern Powerhouse Rail what we did with Crossrail in London,” he said.
It appears to be working. In the polls last week a “Boris bounce” went hand-in-hand with a “Farage flop”. Support for the Tories is up five points; the Brexit Party is down by the same amount.
But to unify leavers Johnson will need to recruit specific groups. The first is “Mansfield Man”. Seats such as Mansfield, a pro-Brexit Labour seat won by the Tories in 2017, are filled with blue-collar, aspirational and patriotic leavers. Boris will need to reach deep into this territory to win over mechanics, plumbers and small business owners — today’s equivalent of Thatcher’s Essex Man or Blair’s Mondeo Man.
Mansfield Man leans a little left on the economy, believing it is rigged against him, and a little right on culture, believing we should leave the EU, control immigration and get tough on crime. He wants more apprenticeships in a society that is obsessed with degree-holders and, while he is open to Labour, as Blair showed, he loathes Corbyn. Today, he quite likes Farage.
To win them over, Johnson will need to work harder than May. In 2017, the Tories enjoyed their strongest result among the working class since Thatcher came to power but they still captured only six pro-Brexit Labour seats.
Another smaller group is “Lost Leavers”, left behind and deeply disillusioned Brits who do not usually engage in politics but backed Brexit in 2016. These instinctive conservatives failed to show up for May in 2017. Boris needs to find them and get them to vote.
Then come the older, lifelong pro-Brexit “true blue” Tories in southern England and coastal communities, who worried at the last election that a Tory government might take their homes if they got dementia. Boris needs to repair this relationship and ensure they turn out en masse. If Johnson does all this and mobilises a leave alliance, he could defend his “blue wall” in southwest England, which was central to Cameron’s majority in 2015, against the resurgent Lib Dems and help his party advance in Brexit-backing Labour seats.
But the problem with this strategy is that it depends heavily on something that is out of the control of Johnson and Cummings: a divided opposition. The problem for Corbyn is that even if Boris wins only half of what remains of Farage’s vote then, alongside tribal Tories, he is climbing back towards 40% of the vote, close to what May achieved in 2017. Meanwhile, the electorate Corbyn put together two years ago has imploded. Only half have stayed loyal since 2017; one third has left for the Lib Dems or Greens, while another rump has gone to Farage or Johnson. Corbyn’s ratings have crashed. Johnson could ruthlessly exploit these divisions and capture a wave of seats where Lib Dems take more votes from Labour, allowing a consolidated “leave” vote to cross the line with a majority of 70-80.
But what if the opposition does not stay divided? It is not hard to see how all of this could backfire, leaving Johnson humiliated like May in 2017. Corbyn and Labour turn up the volume on climate change, support for remain and populist attacks against the distant wealthy elite embodied in Britain’s 20th Etonian prime minister. If Labour frames the new government as secretly wanting to privatise the NHS, put crony capitalism on steroids and turn Britain into a “Singapore-on-Thames”, it could put its fractured coalition back together — remainers, Greens and liberals who tactically conclude that, while Labour is divided, it is still the best bet against the sequel to Vote Leave.
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