Supping With The Devil Haters

Anthony McIntyre with his thoughts on the Theresa May election debacle.

"It is permitted in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge," – Bulgarian Proverb ...

But only the devil, not his haters.

For her grave electoral miscalculation, British prime minister Theresa May has in the past 36 hours been drawing down ridicule faster than the speed of sound. The strident MSM criticism of May has nothing to do with the wrongfulness of harsh Tory policy per se. Toryism holds that the way to attack poverty is by creating more of it. May is the target of sound and fury because of bad predictions, not bad policy. 

Such is the brouhaha that May, if she were the sort of person who felt apologetic, might offer contrition by appearing at the House of Commons despatch box wearing a dunce’s hat. Rarely, if ever has a British Prime Minister turned up on the winner's podium wearing the attire of the mourner.

Excluding for now the Law of Lazarus, her long-term future as Tory leader and British Prime Minister is in serious doubt. She is being lambasted as a fool for having made what turned out to be an undeliverable strategic evaluation, followed by a series of calamitous tactical errors. Strategically, she called a general election aimed at an all round shoring up of the Tory hegemony. Sensible enough. Tactically the measures employed to secure the desired strategic outcome were hopelessly inept.

Despite the ex post facto volume of discourse about her risky venture, not too many in the MSM were saying such at the time. Then, she was hardly wrong to go for the election. She was streets ahead in the opinion polls. It seemed a master stroke that would achieve multiple objectives in one decisive move: more than decimate Labour; colonise the Ukip constituency; substantially increase the Tory majority to the point where a five-year term was virtually guaranteed; and enhance her negotiating hand in the Brexit talks. 

When she sprang her announcement of a June general election there was little to indicate that it would end as it did. She was odds on favourite to secure a substantial and comprehensive victory. Had May held off and possibly in the wake of Brexit negotiations felt compelled to go to the country only to sustain an even worse defeat than Thursday's, she would be facing the accusation that she should have gone in June 2017; and that by not doing so she failed to see the optimum strategic moment in which to entrench a five year term, one party government not dependent on the type of support Israeli leaders find themselves depending on – the rabid religious right.

With the Labour Party in seeming disarray May’s move made sense. The prospect of inflicting on Corbyn's Labour Party what Thatcher had done to the hapless Michael Foot's Labour in 1983 was alluring. May would not have it said of her, in that memorable Abba Eban phrase, that she never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 

She could not have foreseen that her strategy of collapsing the Ukip vote would have resulted in the bulk of that party’s voters transferring to Labour: surely such people move to the right not the left. Most crucially, she was not to know-and few seemed to tell her regardless of what they now say - that cometh the hour cometh the Corbyn. The Blairites who favour a Tory Party called Labour had been such an impediment across the path of Corbyn, that the Tories must have felt “job done” before it had even started. With so many career politicians in the Labour parliamentary party enthusiastically cheered on by the Guardian, Corbyn seemed reduced to making the sound arguments without ever winning them. 

Then "events, dear boy, events" made their intervention. May handed Corbyn the law of unintended consequences and he transformed his fortunes with event after event. From a cameo role he emerged to become the star of the show, closing the gap in the opinion polls and working wonders for Labour's image.

The politics of campaign performance rather than the politics of pre-election promises and policies did it for Corbyn. Until he took to the hustings reaching an audience with a message not filtered by the Guardian few seemed to be listening. Then the great constituency of Slumberland awakened and a cavalry of young people rode over the hill.

It was a monumental achievement for the beleaguered and maligned Labour leader. So much so that the person who in real time lost the election, is very much regarded as being the winner in a contest where the formal winner gets to wear a dull and cracked crown.  

How long the DUP infused concoction being put together by May holds its taste is anybody’s guess. She has in her haze and daze looked for any port in a storm and saw one spouting a bigger union Jack than she will have seen anywhere on “the mainland” and ordered full speed ahead to have her engine room refuelled with Renewable Heat Incentive, courtesy of the pirates she is now parleying with. 

Down the line if she manages to survive long enough and calm her seas she might try feeling out the currently ideologically hostile Liberal Democrats. Their opposition to Brexit will make any marriage a slow affair. But the Lib Dems have shown an aptitude for betraying everything to get their jaxies on ministerial seats. The greatest dissolvent of ideological principle yet developed is "Ministeritis" and there is no short supply of it in the Lib Dems who may, like the Irish Labour Party, feign that they would be irresponsible not to curb the excesses of a right wing government: for the good of the nation  and all that guff. Having been there before, they know the drill.

Improbable, even imponderable. Still, it would provide more stability and longevity than her alliance with the devil haters.