Tag Archives: election strategy

Embed from Getty Images

Seldom has there been such a need for care in the way we do politics. We may be right about certain things, but the current surreal situation means that being right isn’t good enough – we have to judge the mood.

It is, for example, entirely legitimate to say that the entire basis on which the Conservatives won an 80-seat mandate just four months ago has been obliterated, that public spending requirements during the coronavirus outbreak have been so great that, once the crisis is over, there must be a new election. But it wouldn’t go down well if we said that now.

What we can do, however, is start planning for the next election (both general and local), and for that we will need a vision. Regardless of how long the current disruption continues, it has been so disruptive as to make the next election a lot like 1945. On that occasion, there was no lack of appreciation for the way Churchill had run the war effort, but when it came to the Britain people wanted after the war, Labour had a vision – essentially a liberal vision, but we’ll let that go – that caught the imagination of the voters.

We need a similar vision for the first post-virus election, whenever it takes place. In some ways the government has done a good job, in others it’s been dreadful, but neither will really matter come the election. What will matter is the future. There’s already a strong suggestion that people don’t want to go back to what we had pre-virus, that they welcome the cooperation and civility that has (largely) characterised the response to Covid-19. The inward looking petty nationalism of Johnson’s election victory could start to look seriously out of sync with the times.