If there is ever an inquest into who torpedoed Theresa May’s chances of winning the 2017 election outright, the answer should not be in doubt. The Prime Minister was the author of her own destruction – or, at least, the staggering and needless destruction of her party’s majority. The decision to hold an early election was taken not in political cabinet, but on a walking holiday with her husband. None of her cabinet colleagues advised her to personalise her campaign to such a bizarre extent; her disastrous manifesto was as much of a surprise to them as it was to the public.
Theresa May did all this herself, with a few handpicked aides – and if she had triumphed, she’d have governed in this way. She could justifiably have said that her approach had been vindicated. She would have won not only on a manifesto that was a product of her own brand of Conservatism, but also thanks to her operating style. Now that gamble has ended in calamity.
May is left with a dazed party that just a few weeks ago was expecting to destroy Labour in its heartlands; instead it has ended up being routed in its own. Even Kensington & Chelsea was wobbling at the time of writing. It has left Tories all asking the same question: what on earth happened?
The shell-shocked staff at Tory HQ feel that three things went wrong. First, the public is fed up with austerity. Rather than the structural deficit being abolished by 2015, as was the plan, it still exists – indeed, Mrs May gave herself another ten years to balance the books. With the Tories taking the deficit off the table as an issue, they had no response to Jeremy Corbyn’s promise to spend more on pretty much everything.
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