Nine lessons from the election: Boris was lucky – but he also played his hand right

The 2019 general election will be remembered as one of the most consequential elections in Britain’s recent history. Aside from rejecting a more economically radical Labour Party, the British people used the election to provide what their elected representatives had been unable to provide: an answer to Brexit. For Boris Johnson and the Conservative party, the election was a triumph. They won their largest majority since 1987 and the largest majority for any party since New Labour’s second landslide in 2001. Remarkably, and despite older arguments about the ‘costs of ruling’, a Conservative Party that had been in power for nearly a decade attracted nearly 44 per cent of the vote; this was not only its highest share since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 but its fourth consecutive increase since entering power in 2010. A Conservative party leader who had been widely derided before the election became, after John Major, only the second leader in British history to lead his party to a fourth term in office.