Yahoo News Both leaders need an election to remind their parties who’s the boss
The Soviet-era joke about how to motivate the workers went: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” This was clearly the management manual consulted by Jeremy Corbyn in his appeal to head a “national unity” government yesterday. It was also fine-tuned to achieve no unity whatsoever.
Perhaps that was its aim, since Corbyn’s primary objective is a roll-of-the-dice election, preferably amid the chaos of a badly handled departure from the EU. Or maybe there is a default switch in the Labour leader’s office which ensures that however pressing the need to create a broad Commons coalition to stop Britain leaving the EU with little preparation, he would give another, different, speech, designed to rile any MP who isn’t on Team Jeremy to start with.
No heed was paid to the coalition it would take to make a caretaker government work in practice — the sensibilities of Labour moderates, Liberal Democrats and Tory anti-Brexiteers. We even got a reference to the 1945 Labour landslide, the touchstone of “Old” Labour mythology that everything was very promising more than seven decades ago.
No deal, in these terms, is another function of wicked Tories as “posh” multi-millionaires who are “fake populists” (as opposed to real ones, which made me wonder why being a real populist was better than being a pretend one). Rhetorically, this was like settling into an old sofa, with familiar dents and lumpy springs. It was useless in cajoling a wider group to put aside differences and strive to stop something happening on October 31 that they have many different reasons for opposing.
Corbyn may well want to quietly back Brexit, and have the Conservatives take the blame. Or possibly he has only one message of class conflict and no intention of nuancing it to appeal to the centrists that he despises. Or a bit of both — either way, it left a mighty challenge for purveyors of the “government of national unity” solution to stave off a no-deal Brexit by aligning Parliament’s Remain forces against Johnson.
In some ways it played to Jo Swinson’s conviction that a Corbyn-led alternative government, even for a short time, is not going to command a majority — and not on these terms of tribal warfare.
If the “numbers are just not there so long as Jeremy is in that car to Buckingham Palace” (as one veteran Labour Remainer puts it), then the caretaker plan has to move along to another figurehead as soon as possible.
Many strange tales of ways to stop Brexit have been told around the Westminster campfire over the past two years. And yes, there’s blame enough to go round — the confluence of inflexible Tory ERG-ers and shilly-shallying Labour MPs who would not countenance the Theresa May deal and now wonder why they are facing a no-deal Brexit.
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Johnson was also on the August stump, speaking of “bumps in the road” in dealings with European leaders who baulk at the absolutist rhetoric of his demand to dispense with the Irish backstop as the pre-condition of another withdrawal deal. Oddly, Johnson and Corbyn face problems which align them. Each has pitched a variant on a populist theme: Corbyn’s is a top-hat caricature of capitalism while Johnson’s is a return to the Vote Leave boast that with one leap and a bound, Britain can be free of the onerous EU, while suffering only mild “bumps in the road” as a consequence.
Both appear uneasy at the moment: Corbyn is like a man who does not really want to be united with his foes outside the socialist church and won’t commit to a full-strength Remain platform. Johnson enjoys the job of Conservative leader, one he has long hankered for. But the attendant chore of being Prime Minister for the whole country still sits a tad uneasily on those crumbled-shirt shoulders. His dazed expression on the visit to Truro Hospital in Cornwall reminded us that the grind of Number 10 and its demand to combine message-discipline with empathy takes skill to master.
"Corbyn looks like a man who does not really want to be united with his foes outside the socialist church"
This will matter as Corbyn lets slip the dogs of class war, with attacks intended to highlight the new Tory leader’s rarefied social status as a sign that he cannot be trusted with the interests of ordinary folk. Yet one side or the other has to win or lose the battle to fend off no deal. Perhaps the result will be externally dictated, by the last-minute switch at the EU level some of Johnson’s team are relying on.
It’s worth remembering, in the fog of battle, that a vote of “no confidence” in a leader still leaves him options to persist in office, seeing as the Commons looks keener on punishing Johnson than subsequently voting for confidence in Corbyn. So shrewder Remainers are putting more faith in constitutional wrangles to stop the PM heading to the polls before Brexit — they will most likely seek another extension and/or judicial review to eat away at Johnson’s command of the timetable.
All that said, I wonder how much it matters to Johnson to hold an election before the end of October anyway, if the first stated aim of leaving the EU can be achieved. I think he sorely underestimates the problems that come afterwards, but the Boris-ian view is that this can be sorted out if the Tories are returned with a clear majority. Big if.
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There are signs that the election machine is revving up in Number 10, with voter-friendly messages being pumped out and the PM on school and hospital visits to remind MPs that they need his blessing to keep their marginal seats. Downing Street’s policy unit under Munira Mirza has been transformed from a sluggish Theresa May-style ideas factory into a lab for the creation of appealing election-winning policies. The whole place is on election alert.
For that reason, Corbyn may be about to get (some of) his way. The “national government” will remain the political equivalent of The Hunting of the Snark — an enticing but fruitless expedition most realists know will not result in a trophy. An early election has become the gamble both Johnson and Corbyn need to assert their authority in riven parties. For that reason, it is likely to happen.
Anne McElvoy is senior editor of The Economist
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