On Friday morning, just hours after David Cameron, the leader of the center-right Conservative party, won the 2015 UK general election, he and the leaders of the main political parties stood side by side at the Cenotaph memorial in central London to mark the seventieth anniversary of VE Day. It was a powerful image. These leaders were still in the midst of electoral triumph and disaster. Emotion was etched into the faces of them all. If you wanted an image of liberal democracy in its civilized glory–the point of that victory against Nazism–there it was on show for the world to see.
But behind this tableau of national commemoration, there was another curious story being worked out. The wreath-laying at the Cenotaph was led not by Queen Elizabeth II, but by her son, the Duke of York. That may seem an incidental detail, yet it tells us something about how the British Establishment expected this year’s general election to go. The Queen, as Princess Elizabeth, was a young woman during the second world war. She feels a deep connection with the wartime generation. It is inconceivable that she would not have attended this commemoration without good reason. Instead she was outside London at Windsor Castle. And the reason she was there, we must presume, was because court and government officials feared even the impression of constitutional impropriety. Few expected a clean result at this election; the politicians on duty at the Cenotaph expected this event to be a dignified break in between negotiations to form a coalition. Even the smallest glance or action by the Queen towards any of them might be misinterpreted as expressing a political opinion. Better to stay away altogether. Instead HMQ found herself dashing back to Buckingham Palace to receive David Cameron, who told her that he had won the election and would be forming his second administration.
The election was a triumph for Cameron, his right hand man and finance minister George Osborne, and Lynton Crosby, the party’s election manager. Crosby–“the wizard of Oz”–had already masterminded four consecutive election victories for John Howard in Australia and helped Boris Johnson win two elections as mayor of London. His strategy in 2015 was based around a simple core message: voters do not trust the left-of-center Labour party on the economy and think Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband, is not up to the job of being prime minister. Osborne delivered the economic competence turning Britain into the fastest growing economy among the G7 nations; Cameron consistenty outpolled Miliband on leadership qualities. Those facts remained unaltered throughout the entire campaign. Crosby said that voters would turn to the Conservatives late in the day. He was right. As the A-Team’s Hannibal Smith might say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
The Conservative election victory brought with it in quick succession four political funerals.
First to depart was the Liberal-Conservative coalition government itself, in office since 2010. History will be kind to this administration. It provided stability and discipline during the period of global crisis that followed the 2008 crash. The junior partners, the Liberal Democrats, were constructive and responsible allies throughout the five year parliament, playing a central role in many of the government’s achievements. That didn’t stop the Conservatives hunting them down during the election campaign, targeting traditional liberal strongholds in the outer London boroughs and the southwest of England. The Victorian statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, once noted that Britain “does not love coalitions.” It likes junior coalition partners even less, it seems. The Conservatives tooks the spoils from the coalition government, the Lib Dems only the detritus of unpopular policies such as university tuition fees.
The demise of Nick Clegg as Lib Dem leader quickly followed that of the coalition in which he had been deputy prime minister. Clegg will be able to look back on those achievements in government, but the harsh political fact remains that his party lost forty-seven members of parliament (MPs) at this election, leaving them with a rump of just eight MPs in the House of Commons. Rather like Sir Robert Peel in 1846, Clegg governed in the national interest, but in the process destroyed his party for a generation.
The night was hardly any better for Labour. Having won three handsome victories under Tony Blair (1997, 2001 and 2005) by claiming the center ground of British politics, they have now lost the last two elections (2010 and 2015) by running to the left. If Labour wants to win in 2020, it will need to re-stake that claim to the center ground. The party will also need to do a better job at picking its leader. Ed Miliband resigned hours after defeat by the Conservatives. In truth, Labour lost this election five years ago when it chose Ed over his older brother David (the former foreign minister now running an NGO in New York). Ed Miliband beat expectations in his personal performance during the campaign, but most voters concluded years ago that he was too leftwing and lacked the authority to govern. Chuka Umunna, Dan Jarvis or Yvette Cooper would all do a better job than the hapless Ed.
The resignations of Clegg and Miliband were accompanied by that of Nigel Farage, the leader of the right wing populist party UKIP. Or perhaps he’s just taking a summer holiday. Farage had promised to step down if not elected in his constituency (district) of South Thanet. He duly lost and announced his resignation. But there will be a leadership contest in September, at which time he says he may decide to “throw my hat into the ring.”
The election was a mixed one for UKIP. The party polled eleven per cent of the popular vote–more than the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party put together–but only won a single seat (Clacton). Immediately they cried foul, saying that the electoral system needed to change. In fact, the result shows that the system works. Britain is a country that by and large has shunned political extremes; in the 1930s, for example, the British Union of Fascists were a laughing stock. The system is built to reinforce that disposition, rewarding whichever party from the left or the right can reach into the center ground. “Fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists,” as David Cameron once described UKIP, need not apply.
With the leaders of the three other biggest parties in England having departed, David Cameron now has possession of the political field. While rival parties focus inwards on inquests and leadership campaigns, he has the opportunity to make the political weather. Many commentators have pointed to the fact that the 2015 election has echoes of that in 1992, when the Conservatives won despite the pollsters predicting a hung parliament or Labour victory. Cameron will happily take the unexpected victory, but he will be less keen to repeat the vicissitudes of John Major, the winner that night. Major governed in agony from 1992 to 1997, increasingly hemmed in by right wing rebels in his own cabinet whom he christened “the bastards.” Like prime ministers Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan before him, Major can attest to the frustrations of running a government on a dwindling majority (MPs die or resign; governments rarely win by-elections) while needing to cut deals with every pipsqueak backbencher who has a price or wants a moment in the limelight.
Two factors, however, will help determine if Cameron can avoid a repeat of the torments of previous governments with small majorities.
First, hours after the election, Cameron promised to govern as “one nation.” This is the kind of talk that often riles up the Conservative right (Mrs Thatcher defined herself as the exact opposite of a “one nation Tory”). The right of his own party has often derided Cameron for his admiration of an earlier Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, who was the epitome of this tradition. Yet with the Scottish National Party (SNP) the other big winner of this election, taking 56 out of 59 seats in Scotland, even the most myopic Conservative hardliner recognizes that Cameron has to bridge the gap between England and Scotland. To ignore the fact that the SNP swept Scotland would put the union itself in peril. Cameron officially heads the Conservative and Unionist Party; that name has to mean something now for the United Kingdom to continue as one nation, even as Cameron introduces “English votes for English laws.”
Second, the Major government descended into civil war over Europe. That may still happen under Cameron, but he has already given his own eurosceptics MPs the thing they wanted most: an in/out vote on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. That may seem incomprehensible to most in Washington D.C. or Beijing, but it speaks to the deep alienation and irritation that many, perhaps most Britons feel towards Europe. For them, the project has always been about a “common market” not an “ever closer union.”
No-one believes that David Cameron or George Osborne, who will lead the negotiations with Britain’s European partners, wants the UK to leave the EU. But European leaders will have to accept now that the British people have given Cameron a mandate knowing that he will hold a referendum on EU membership by 2017. If they believe a “Brexit” would be disastrous for Britain, they surely also know it would be a calamity for the EU itself. Expect the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to crack heads together to give Cameron something to take home in order to win a referendum.
Whether any such deal will be enough to keep eurosceptic backbenchers happy is another question. But Cameron has already said that he will not be seeking another term as prime minister. Perhaps he would consider a successful referendum vote as enough to cement his place in the history books. He’s already won two terms as prime minister and a comfortable victory in the independence referendum in Scotland. Who would bet against success in an EU referendum?
For say what you like about David Cameron, the people, in England at least, have come to trust his judgement. That’s the political elixir possessed of only a very few. As advertising guru Bill Bernbach once wisely noted, “An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.”
