(Oh Shite)

As anyone who reads my self-indulgent rambles can probably guess, that was not the result I was hoping for. Never before have I seen such an eager rush to dogpile into the infamous handbasket just before it sets off. Nor when so many seemed well aware of its destination. But the truth is, there wasn’t really any result I was hoping for and this isn’t the result I was hoping for the least.

There was no way I was going to wake up (read: go to bed) happy with the result, because all potential outcomes were bad. Corbyn has been awful. The people around Corbyn have been even more awful. I hate Boris, but not even half as much as I hate the people in his cabinet or whispering into his ear. And the Lib Dems ran a campaign that careened between useless to reprehensible.

The whole election is proof of the adage that to outrun a lion, you don’t need to be a fast runner. You just need to be a faster runner than whoever you’re with. On this one, Labour were a bloated corpse loaded up with hams, which waddled zombie-like towards the lion.

Rather than the result itself, my main point of despair relates to how it came about. Awful opposition that allowed the Tories to get away with murder; the result is validation of morally bankrupt behaviour. Campaigns will now be in a race to the bottom of dirty tricks, vote manipulation through calculated lie-retraction cycles, slander and general dystopian Ministry of Truth bullshit. I’m not gutted because Cretin A beat Buffoon B. I’m gutted because the one thing we as a nation just sanctioned with absolute clarity is the degeneration of politics into post-truth psyops. The only way to win is to play dirty and the dirtiest player will be the winniest.

So, really, it’s not a case of lamenting a Tory landslide. As mentioned above, it could have been worse – a small Tory minority would have meant either an ultra-hard Brexit or years more of going around in ever-tighter circles of self-harm. Or a huge Labour majority, but that was never realistic anyway. It was always going to be turds on toast, whatever the outcome. So, let’s just consider which flavour of shit we’ve all just opted for, why that one rather than any other, and what we can do about changing it in the future.

While there’s a lot to say, in terms of complexity there are really only two major factors behind this landslide for the Conservatives. One of them is the Labour Party, which I’ll cover in another piece. The other is…

Brexit

Being the exciting type I am, I put together a spreadsheet of about 120 seats that were either close marginals, target seats, or where someone of note was MP. I included the referendum result for each seat. One of the things that became clear very early on was that the correspondence between areas that voted for Brexit and areas that abandoned Labour for the Conservatives. It played a very, very, very important role in this election. I don’t think it bucked the trend in a single constituency.

But this morning Boris has come out saying it shows Brexit is the “unarguable decision of the British people”. While I think that’s precisely what the parliamentary arithmetic shows, it’s not entirely true. Firstly, it looks like Remain parties actually got a slightly larger share of the popular vote. This suggests that in a like-for-like contest – i.e. a second referendum – the results may well have said something completely different. So no, not unarguable – I think if that had been the case, there’d have been a referendum rather than an election. But the matter has now been politically determined, that is unarguable.

The damage that Brexit has done to this country is already significant. I think there are many and good reasons to think there will be more damage to come; never having had the referendum in the first place would have been the best outcome for this country, socially and economically.

But that’s really beside the point. We did have a referendum and it was in favour of leaving. Therefore, Brexit happening now seems like a better outcome than Brexit continually not happening for many more years to come. Would we have been better off remaining? Yes. Is that a realistic option now? No. So, fingers crossed we somehow end up somewhere not shit at the end of it. I’m not holding my breath.

But we are probably better off with a clear Tory majority than a very small one. And there’s another reason to think that the Conservatives having won the number of seats they have, and the kind of seats those are, points to another interesting silver lining. Because what comes next?

You are what you eat

On a few occasions throughout the night, pundits mentioned the fact that a large majority might actually result in a softer Brexit. This is because the party is no longer hostage to the loathsome charlatans of the far-right ERG, meaning Boris is able to get a deal through without having to pander to their insane Rule Britannia delusions.

And there may well be some truth to that. Certainly, if Boris has made a manifesto promise to get the trade agreement sorted by the end of 2020, moving more towards a softer Brexit would be a credible option. Do I believe he will feel the need to keep his promises? No. But I do believe he’s a raging narcissist who will desperately want to win re-election and that means holding on to the newly-won seats.

This result looks to be a paradigm shift in the British political landscape. I think that’s probably the case and hope that the relevant parties react accordingly. But what many in the Conservative movement – the party and their core voters – are going to gradually realise is that while they’ve changed the electoral map of the UK, in doing so it has also changed them. The abyss stares back etc.

So no, Boris is no longer at the mercy of the unpleasant and unsound of mind; Bill Cash can go back to just being a horrible, decomposing scowl with bones in it on the back bench. Mark Gino Francois can go back to thumping his chest about this one time he was in the Reserves 20 years ago, sticking it to The Hun in Iraq as part of an operation to save an orphanage full of oil. No; now Boris is at the mercy of communities whose party allegiance has changed – for now – but whose needs and dreams have not.

What the Tories may find they’ve just done is drag themselves back to the centre. At least, if they don’t want this to be a one-time swing. So I would not be at all surprised if things suddenly go all New Labour, policy-wise. Could Boris just keep tacking to the right? Yeah, I suppose so. But has he ever really come across as a committed ideologue about anything, let alone things that are going to make his life very difficult, such as a no-deal Brexit would? No.

Boris is an opportunist; he says what is expedient at the time and then goes on to do whatever he was going to do anyway. It’s one of the reasons I think he’s an awful person. But that sword has two very sharp edges and the far right of the party may well find him walking back from positions that are exactly those they’d cheered him on over.

And to keep the vote he has won, to do the things he wants to do and feed his ego in the way he so clearly needs it fed, those constituencies will expect jobs. They will expect significant investment, the building of new hospitals and reinvigoration of old ones, and better schools to give their children better prospects than they’ve had themselves. If they aren’t delivered those things, they are likely to go back to voting red the moment someone vaguely appealing is back in control of the Labour party.

And, in fairness: if they are delivered those things, in a way which works, then well done Boris. Dubious doesn’t even begin to cover my thoughts on that, but I’ll lay my cards on the table right now and say if he somehow manages it, he’ll deserve the credit. But even if he doesn’t manage it, he will at least need to be seen to try. And that is what is going to leave a lot of traditional, right-leaning Tories feeling betrayed.

Speaking of feeling betrayed, there’s another piece, too large to cover here, about what happened for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, as well as what comes next. But in terms of what we see immediately from the Conservatives, I think it’ll be all about hitting that end of January deadline and then using the threat of an aggressive Trump trade agreement as a stick to batter the EU with to give us what will be a slightly softened Brexit trade agreement in exchange for some trophy concessions.