The Ending Doesn't Work.
How politicians get trapped by the stories they tell.
General Elections are the Olympics of storytelling. The competitors honing their narratives, all hoping to be named most convincing. I mean this without cynicism. How else but by telling a story can we explore the realities of recent history and near future, both simultaneously vast yet granular. However, the stories we tell can imprison us in ways we do not expect.
It’s a tired joke that the Conservative’s successful anti-slogan of 2015 invoking the spectre of “chaos and confusion with Ed Milliband” instead conjured the chaos and confusion of David Cameron, Theresa May and Brexit. Less has been made of how the 2019 campaign, in part fought on the urgent need to stop the rise socialism under a pacifist who would disrespect our troops, somehow left us with Rishi Sunak, who as Chancellor paid everybody not to work, gave out half priced meals and paid half our energy bills and who then, as PM, disrespected the D-Day veterans like a cosplay Corbyn.
Of course Rishi Sunak is no socialist, his actions as Chancellor were a response to a once-in-a-lifetime global emergency. Neither is he a peacenik, his mess-up on D-Day clearly just the wild panicky mistakes of a man trapped by magical thinking, convinced if he just tries hard enough he can still save the job he’s already lost. But actions speak louder than words. The country voted for stability and got chaos. It voted against state intervention and got furlough. With that track record what hopes do we have for the outcome of this “change” election? The general mood is that “we can’t keep going on like this” but we can and likely will. Sir Kier hasn’t carried his metaphorical Ming Vase all this way just to do an Ai Wei Wei. Winning like this, what choice will he have but to remain nervously clenched until 2029?
Why does the story a party tells in an election haunt it in this way? Stories such as these are not just illusions, it’s never that cynical. They’re also more than the ad man’s trick of selling something as the opposite of what it is. Rather, having diagnosed the voter’s worst case scenario, the winners are left tacitly aware of the limits of what they can get away with. Again I don’t think this is cynical, deliberate or even conscious. Cameron didn’t plan for chaos but also knew he could get away with some bumps and still be better than the alternative.
2019 is a fascinating example. I thought in the run up to that bleak midwinter vote that it was a bad election to win and that whomsoever did would condemn their party to a generation out of office. In the aftermath the scale of Johnson’s majority convinced me I’d been very wrong but turning that stupendous victory into July’s potential annihilation is a political miracle in classic Boris style; as is the way he is nowhere to be seen as the car finally goes over the cliff.
When the dust settles Sunak will blame Truss but this election is a disaster of Johnson’s creation. It was Johnson and Cummings who won by extending the bounds of the Conservative electorate to include the economically forgotten working class voters who were traditionally Labour supporters. But you cannot hold traditional working class labour seats without eventually offering something of traditional working class labour politics. Put aside the pandemic, following 2019, some form of state intervention was always baked in. Had he resisted the temptations of soiling his office and kept power, Johnson could have squared the circle by dressing up public spending as nationalist boosterism. As it is he bequeathed his mandate to a pair of rigid minds neither of whom showed any understanding of question that was being asked of them.
The real winning story of 2019 was “Get Brexit Done” and whilst Johnson claimed mission accomplished his achievement was, if more than Brexit In Name Only, still merely Brexit In Law Only. Real Brexit, Unicorn Brexit, wasn’t just about leaving the EU. Unicorn Brexit was a desire for something to actually change. The hope that if those who have been the winners in our economy for the last four decades could be made to lose something, maybe then everyone else would feel like a winner.
Though the facts often appear to suggest otherwise, people aren’t actually stupid. They don’t pay attention. They prefer easy, painless, comforting solutions. They make mistakes. But they’re not actually stupid. It’s like when someone reads your script and says the ending doesn’t work - they may have diagnosed the wrong problem but they are always right that there is a problem.
As an aside, “the ending doesn’t work” is, I would guess, the most common note ever given on a screenplay and, I would argue, is almost always wrong. Whenever someone tells me the ending doesn’t work I always look back to the midpoint because in most cases that’s where the problem actually lies. It’s not the end, it’s how believable the end is in relation to what has been happening. We can argue whether the idea of leaving the EU was ever the best route to achieving anything but, like I say, the electorate aren’t here to give detailed script notes, they just say that they don’t like the ending - and they’re not wrong.
In July the electorate will once again give the same script note and once again the political class, determined to retain control over the first draft of history, will do Find & Replace on the main characters’ names and hope that fixes the problem.
Blair’s second election, in June of 2001 seems even more distant than his victory of ’97. Post-End of History but pre-911, it seems almost ahistorical, a dream. No one in Labour today can imagine their next election will be fought on such soft ground. The story of Brexit starts not in the election of 2015 but in the toxic settlement of the 2008 financial crash. That story didn’t end in 2019 which was just the delivery of yet another dish of more of the same. July’s election will once again feel like a grand shift but the story of chaos and confusion will not end until someone finally addresses the deep rooted need for change.