How long ago it seems, that sunny April day when Mrs May came out into Downing Street to say that she would be calling the early election that she had previously and many times disavowed. How long ago it seems, especially to her. What Tories assumed would be a smoothly regal progress back to power with an engorged majority has been a much more torrid affair than they anticipated. Mrs May has never before had a prominent role in a general election. Even as home secretary, she was only incidental to the campaign of two years ago and she was almost invisible during last summer’s Brexit referendum. No amount of the door-knocking that she says she loves is an adequate preparation for the high-wire act that is being a party leader fronting a national campaign. She began this one lacking experience of electioneering at the highest level and it has shown. It has shown in wooden, nervy, blustery and sometimes outright rattled performances in which she has come over as an automaton released on to the market with a malfunction in its software. The sobriquet “Maybot”, coined by John Crace of the Guardian, has been so widely adopted that I now even hear some Tories using it.
Despite the manifold advantages with which she started this campaign, Mrs May has never evinced any sense of joy about making a case to the country. That lack of enthusiasm for the democratic moment has also shown. It has shown in her unwillingness to debate directly with other leaders, a refusal to engage with argument that revealed a sense of entitlement to be prime minister – no questions asked. It has shown in the brittleness of her performances when she has deigned to expose herself to the scrutiny of the electorate.
She did better with the Question Time election special organised by the BBC for Friday night. Her campaign team seemed to have found a patch for the Maybot. Some Tories gamely talk up that performance as “a turning point”, but they would not be speaking of “a turning point” if they did not think they needed one for a shaky campaign that has not run to their original script. Where once they thought this election was going to be a highly enjoyable romp over the prostrate bodies of the opposition parties, most Tories now anticipate the end of this contest with sighs of relief.
Mrs May’s struggle to do effective retail politics has served to flatter Jeremy Corbyn. He has exceeded expectations, not least those of most of his own candidates, who began this campaign terrified that the Labour effort would amount to a series of Corbyn meltdowns. There was a reason that so few Labour candidates wanted a photo of their leader on their election literature. The Labour candidate in my neck of the woods in south London is defending what ought to be a relatively safe seat as if it were a knife-edge marginal. She has campaigned as if Mr Corbyn does not exist. She is delighted to put large snaps of Sadiq Khan, London’s Labour mayor, on her leaflets, but her national leader and putative candidate for the premiership is treated as an unperson.
He has made blunders. He has looked very unsteady whenever a questioner has brought up the IRA or the nuclear deterrent. His brain fade for the benefit of the audience of Woman’s Hour, when he couldn’t recall the cost of one of his keynote policies on the very day that he was launching it, might have been designed to make his old friend Diane Abbott look like a genius at maths. Yet even his most severe critics within his party will concede that Mr Corbyn’s overall performance has been better than they dared hope for at the outset. A lifetime of campaigning for lost causes has been of benefit. Two years of being opposed by nearly all of the media and nearly all of his own MPs has been useful training for performing in a hostile environment.
He has clearly learned some things from the experience. He used to get irritable when faced with questions he didn’t want to answer and often became irascible under pressure. He has trained himself out of that – or had some coaching to suppress the less amiable sides of his character. The hardest haymakers that Jeremy Paxman could launch at him were absorbed with genial bluff by “Monsieur Zen”. When the inquisitor challenged him about his past republicanism, the Labour leader simply twinkled back that he had recently enjoyed a nice natter with the Queen.
As this campaign enters its final furlong, there is a consensus across the parties that the Labour leader has performed above, admittedly low, expectations and the Tory one has looked panicky under pressure. That has been one surprise of this election. Another has been how little of this contest has been about taxation and spending, the staple fare of every previous election that I have covered, and I have covered rather a lot.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has performed its quasi-constitutional duty of auditing the manifestos of the parties. Those stern invigilators of political promise-making were even less impressed than they usually are when they came to the conclusion that neither Mrs May nor Mr Corbyn is being honest with the electorate about the decisions that will face the next government. Mrs May likes to talk about “tough choices”. She made one, which was to require people living in valuable properties to make a larger contribution to the cost of their social care. She then instantly ran from it when it went down like a cup of cold sick with her party’s core support. The Labour prospectus does not acknowledge that there are any tough choices when it presents a lengthy wishlist of spending goodies, all to be conveniently paid for by “someone else”.
I guess we should be grateful that this election has not been yet another one dominated by dodgy dossiers of Tory claims that Labour plans secret “tax bombshells” and Labour counterclaims that the Tories have a clandestine programme of cuts. The voters surely intuit that anything anyone has had to say about tax, growth, borrowing and public services is not to be much trusted and delivery of any pledge is entirely contingent on what sort of deal the next government negotiates on Brexit. That has been the great lacuna of this election, the elephant in the spin room, the gaping black hole at the heart of the entire campaign. Ostensibly, we are only being beckoned to the polling stations because of Brexit. Mrs May called this election, so she said, because she needed a mandate before she faced the negotiators from the EU 27. Yet a mandate for precisely what? That remains as obscure now as it was at the beginning.
She is still asking the country to give her a blank cheque. How much would she be prepared to pay by way of a continuing financial contribution to secure a deal? She will not say. What would be the new regime for immigration under the Tories? She will not tell us. If she walks away from the table with no deal at all, as she has repeatedly suggested that she might, what is the contingency plan to save Britain from an economic crash? She has nothing to add about that either. Under the catch-all excuse of saying she will not reveal her negotiating hand in advance, she has left the British people no wiser as to what she intends to do.
Labour has been little more illuminating. It is only under duress that Labour has talked about Brexit, knowing that its traditional bases of support are horribly split. Ukip has been too busy imploding to push the major parties on Brexit from its direction. The Lib Dems thought to make themselves the voice of Remain voters, a strategy that seemed to hold a lot of promise for them, but which has failed to achieve take off.
Put not your trust in the opinion pollsters for they cannot agree about what is going to happen on 8 June. At no previous election have the polling companies produced such a divergent range of results. Depending largely on how much faith they put in younger voters to turn up, the polls point to everything from a big Tory victory to a hung parliament. The apparent tightening of the race has worried Tories a bit, but it has more alarmed Labour candidates. “The polls are loopy!” exclaimed one Labour contestant defending an East Midlands marginal when we spoke on Friday. One of the weirdest aspects of this strange election is that Labour candidates are not celebrating the improvement in their party’s poll ratings. They are fretting about it. This is because they have been selling themselves to doubtful voters on the basis that it is safe to elect them because there is not a chance in hell of their leader becoming prime minister. One Labour veteran, who had thought himself home and dry, says of the polls: “This is a nightmare for me and an absolute gift to the Tories.”
We will know soon enough whether the “Labour surge” has been for real – or an illusion whose actual contribution will be to help the Tories acquire a larger majority than Mrs May deserves. About much else, we are no more enlightened by this election than we were when she first launched it upon the country on that sunny day, seven long weeks ago.
