I think, you know, we see this election extremely effective Labour Party campaign, which has not allowed the Labour Party to win the election outright but has enabled it to deny the conservatives and Prime Minister May a parliamentary majority.
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To be sure, by last month, I had come around to the conventional wisdom that May’s Conservatives would win. It would make British exports more price competitive around the world – something that was reflected in a rise in shares for major British companies on Friday.
‘Remember this election campaign turned around a great deal on the basis that an very bad lots of people rejecting the politics of fear and instead embracing the politics of hope’.
Here are a selection of the quirky moments that captured the attention of the British public.
But British voters, it is now clear, weren’t fooled. Their core, central message was strong and stable leadership. They realized that they were being manipulated – and they took their revenge at the polls. All of this is true. “The government is apparently brokering a return to Stormont – but how can it if it has some of the politicians in its own camp?”
May insisted she would not be deflected from delivering her vision of a clean Brexit, while working to overhaul the United Kingdom economy and crack down on terrorism – a reference to the two attacks that marked the election campaign.
May attempted to portray Brexit as essentially a done deal.
May was interior minister for six years before taking over from David Cameron in the political chaos that following last June’s Brexit referendum. “Brexit”, May declared, “means Brexit”. She wanted, for example, an end to the automatic right of EU nationals to settle in the U.K. She wanted total control over U.K. trade while maintaining full access to the EU single market, while massively reducing or even eliminating the U.K.’s budget contribution to EU coffers.
Ex-minister Gavin Barwell, who lost his seat in Thursday’s election, was named as the new chief of staff, replacing Mr Timothy and Ms Hill.
The Labour leader accused Mrs May of overseeing a “chaotic” administration which is desperately trying to strike a deal with a party it has little in common with.
She had called the election in a bid to extend her majority and strengthen her hand in the looming Brexit negotiations, but her gamble backfired spectacularly.
Conservative MP Nigel Evans told CNN his party shot itself “in the head” with an “irrelevant” manifesto, which was peppered with “arsenic”.
“This is just the first step”.
The Conservatives have won 44 per cent of the vote, Labour 41 per cent, the Liberal Democrats 8 per cent, UKIP 2 per cent and the Greens 2 per cent. She began this campaign with a 20 point lead in the opinion polls; that she failed to convert it into a parliamentary majority is a startling achievement and one that, for once, disproves the age-old maxim that campaigns rarely matter or do much to alter the fundamentals that drive the electoral process.
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So: a possible Conservative leadership change which could see Boris Johnson succeed Theresa May; then a second general election; and beyond that the possibility of a second “Brexit” vote – and which could, of course, see the whole deal thrown out. The currency has been highly volatile in the last year, from $1.50 a year ago before the Brexit vote to below $1.18 briefly in October. In one sense the British people have dealt themselves a hard hand politically, for they now have to live with the prospect of continuing uncertainty on the direction that their country will take with regard to Brexit and also other domestic concerns.
