Incorrigble Corbyn

The National Interest, June 19, 2018

If Britain is now on a track that may see its democracy endangered, an outbreak of carelessness, complacency and quite astounding stupidity in the summer of 2015 will bear much of the blame. In the general election held in May that year, David Cameron, a Conservative who had led a coalition government for five years, won the Tories a surprising absolute majority. It was not large, but it meant he could not use the excuse of coalition to renege on his promise of a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.

That was a drama for later. What mattered that summer was that Labour leader Ed Miliband had stood down. His successor was a bolt from the red: Jeremy Corbyn, an extreme (in all senses of the word) representative of what Orwell called that “dreary tribe of…sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Naturally, the bearded Corbyn has been spotted in sandals, and drinks very little or, possibly, no alcohol (“my secret is apple juice or coconut water”).

But back to Miliband: the most interesting thing about him is that he was ruthless enough to beat his brother David, a former foreign minister and the favorite for the job, in the previous contest for the Labour leadership. Nevertheless, he was a consequential leader in two key respects. The first was the mere fact of his election. ‘Red Ed’s’ Caining of his more Blairite brother accelerated Labour’s move away from the legacy of its electorally most successful prime minister.

The second was yet another change (there have been many) in the rules for choosing Labour’s leader. The story is too ornate to go into here, but it would be a shame not to mention that a brawl in a House of Commons bar serves as its prologue. Its conclusion was the replacement of Labour’s electoral college with a “one member, one vote” electorate. This was made up of party members, members of affiliated trade unions who registered as supporters and a new category of ‘supporting members’ who could effectively buy a vote in exchange for a payment of three pounds—the price, one Labour mp noted, of the ‘meal deal’ at one British supermarket chain. The sole recognition that the UK is a parliamentary democracy was the requirement that this ‘selectorate’ could only choose a candidate nominated by at least 15 percent of Labour’s parliamentary party—a hurdle supposed to weed out the wild men, a category into which Corbyn most certainly fell.

He was a thirty-two-year parliamentary veteran who few Labour parliamentarians seemed to like—and even fewer agreed with. Over the years, he had defied his party whips more than four hundred times. He had been the most rebellious Labour MP throughout the three Blair governments. His views may have been poisonous, but he stood by them.

When Corbyn announced he was going to run for the leadership, Britain’s bookies rated him a 100-to-1 outsider. Between them, Blairites, post-Blairites and the soft left accounted for the vast majority of the parliamentary Labour Party. Corbyn should not have been able to find that 15 percent. He had demonstrated the lack of regard he felt for parliament for decades, perhaps most notoriously by inviting two convicted Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists for a meeting there shortly after the murderous IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, an attempted assassination of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and much of her cabinet. Over three decades later, he used the Palace of Westminster to host “our friends from Hezbollah.” “Unfortunately,” the Israelis—dark stars of Corbyn’s demonology—had stopped “friends from Hamas” from making the trek to London.

As his fellow MPs knew, Corbyn, an apologist for Castro, Chavez and other tyrants, has never had much affection for parliamentary democracy. However good a constituency MP he was (very), however grandfatherly he might now look, however (usually) mild his demeanor, Corbyn’s politics were still characterized by an adolescent’s anger, an adolescent’s certainty of his own rectitude and convictions disturbingly unchanged since his brief stint at the equivalent of a community college in the early 1970s.

Sure enough, the early indications were that Corbyn would fall some way short of securing the necessary nominations, despite the arrival of a number of new Hard-Left Labour MPs into parliament (more evidence that the Blairite tide had receded). However, partly thanks to social media pressure—a vital element in Corbyn’s rise and subsequent ascendancy—some MPs ‘lent’ Corbyn their nominations. Others did likewise in the hope of earning credibility with the Left, others because they wanted to drag the debate leftwards, and still others out of misplaced charity.

Some of those lenders might have been lulled both by the passing of time—the Hard Left’s last serious attempt to take over Labour had been over thirty years ago—and a sentimental attachment to the purs et durs. The comrades might be misguided relics from (it was believed with a confidence born during the Blair years) another age, but their hearts were supposedly in the right place.

Besides, even if he made it to the finals, there was no way that Corbyn could become leader. Really? The social media activity and unmistakable signs of enthusiasm for him at the grassroots level foreshadowed what was coming—and some in the party were already beginning to fret about the unpredictability of the new electoral system. Despite that—and despite Corbyn’s record—enough Labour MPs lent Corbyn their nominations to secure him a place (just) on the ballot paper.

Margaret Beckett, a former foreign minister (and more), subsequently described those MPs who, like herself, had lent their nominations to Corbyn as “morons.” A year later, she was one of those Labour MPs who cast a vote of no confidence in Corbyn’s leadership. Too late.

When the nominations closed, there were four candidates; a keeper of Blair’s extinguished flame, someone somewhat to the left of her, someone quite a bit further left still, and, then, in the depths of left field, Corbyn. Within days, it became evident that those early stirrings on social media and within the constituencies had meant something. The delirious reception Corbyn was receiving on the stump—something that was never to fade, something his opponents could never match—was amplified on social media and echoed in the polls. Increasing numbers of people were joining the party or paying their three pounds. They were not doing so to throw their support behind the hapless Blairite (she ended up with a paltry 4.5 percent of the poll)..

Traditionally the trade unions, a force for hard-nosed restraint—it’s complicated—might have been expected to pump the brakes. Not this time. Instead, many, including Unite, the largest, (and, not only that, the largest Labour donor) stepped on the gas. Its boss, Len McCluskey, endorsed Corbyn. Back in the 1980s, McCluskey had been a supporter of Militant, a Trotskyite group looking to infiltrate the Labour Party, but he never joined them. As he told the Liverpool Echo in 2009:

I decided that Militant was too sectarian from a political standpoint to be effective. But I believe that on the chief issues they were right.

He was playing a longer, smarter game. In 2010, McCluskey was a crucial figure in Miliband’s leadership victory, but soon ‘Red Len’ was attacking ‘Red Ed’ from the left: the game had much further to go, and, so in 2015, realized McCluskey, did Jeremy Corbyn.

By the time the polls closed, there was no doubt over the result. Corbyn won with 59.5 percent of the vote. Many Labour Party staffers, Blairite or something close to it, attending the announcement wore black, in mourning, they thought, for Labour. However, it was their Labour in the coffin—not the same thing at all.

And for all the talk that it was the hundred thousand or so “three pounders” that had handed Labour to Corbyn (84 percent voted for him), Corbyn also won a clear majority of trade union votes and a comfortable plurality (49.6 percent) of party members.

Many Conservatives were delighted: Labour was finished, a suicide. They ought to have smirked less and understood more. The excitement generated by the Corbyn campaign (excitement that translated into action: over a quarter of a million people voted for him) had not only pulled in over 100,000 three pounders (perhaps twenty times what had been originally expected), but also some 180,000 people had joined the party itself, roughly doubling its size. The Conservatives had around 130,000 members at that time. That gap continued to grow. By January 2018, Labour’s membership had grown to 552,000, while by March this year the Tories had shrunk to 118,000.

To be sure, Corbyn’s surge fed on itself in a way that transformed his rallies into a phenomenon that was cultural as well as political, lit celebrations not only of the would-be Labour leader, but also of those who would vote for him. This may have been one of those spasms of collective hysteria to which allegedly reserved Britons occasionally succumb, but ominously for the Conservatives, those include not only the keening for Diana but also the remarkable wave of public feeling that preceded and then accompanied Tony Blair’s first electoral landslide.

Corbyn’s behavior in the aftermath of his triumph only reinforced Tory confidence—and the gloom emanating from Labour’s ancien régime. Rather than attempt some sort of reconciliation with the parliamentary party, he appointed one of its most left-wing and least clubbable members: his old friend and comrade John McDonnell, the man who headed his campaign, as shadow chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), the second most important job on the Labour front bench.

McDonnell is far cleverer, but less diplomatic than his leader. Despite Corbyn’s undisguised appreciation (let’s leave it at that) of those who use force for the right cause, and despite the way that those who oppose him have long found themselves at the wrong end of unpleasant treatment (not least, these days, online), he has, by eschewing overtly violent language, preserved a convenient distance from his rougher supporters. McDonnell is not so fastidious. He has in the past called for the lynching of a Conservative minister (he was angry, he said), and joked about the assassination of Thatcher. He often seems more enthused by “direct action” (“what we used to call insurrection”) than navigating the pathways of parliamentary democracy. As for his intriguing relationship with Irish Republicanism, well, “it’s about time we started honoring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of [hunger striker] Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.” McDonnell’s democratic credentials were not enhanced by a 2006 listing of his “most significant” intellectual influences: Marx (whom Corbyn has dubbed a “great economist”), Lenin and Trotsky.

Seumas Milne, the journalist Corbyn appointed as his communications director, and, in many respects ideological enforcer, is an apologist of sorts for the old Soviet empire and something of a Stalin man: he has argued that the Father of Nations’ misdeeds have been overstated, or at least misrepresented. Meanwhile it emerged that Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s newly-minted head of policy, had (ahead of the 2015 election) urged voters in one constituency to opt for the (anarchist) Class War Party rather than Labour. Fisher was suspended, but with Corbyn giving him his full support, swiftly returned to work.

Margaret Beckett has reproached Corbyn’s inner circle for operating “as if they are not part of the Labour Party.” Winning a general election, she fretted, just didn’t seem to matter to them.

Once again, the ‘moron’ missed the point. Corbyn and his clique are playing that long game. The first step is taking over the Labour Party, half of the duopoly (nationalist complications in the Celtic fringe aside) that has largely driven British politics since 1945. The UK’s combination of “first past the post” voting with a purely parliamentary system (there’s no room for a Macron) hugely favors the existing party structure. There’s been a trickle of moderate Labour MPs leaving parliament since Corbyn’s victory. Some appear to have abandoned electoral politics altogether. Understandably so: The lessons of history are clear—the likelihood of a new party making a breakthrough is close to zero.

Corbyn’s team must know that Labour, as the only ‘real’ alternative to the Conservatives, will someday surely win a general election. If by then the Corbynistas dominate the party, the country will be theirs to rule as they see fit. They have thus concentrated on gaining control of Labour’s institutional structure. Sometimes this is just a matter of placing the right apparatchik in the right job, but sometimes it takes votes. Underlining the extent to which Labour belongs to Corbyn, his candidate (a former Unite official) has been elected as the new general secretary, and Team Corbyn has won majorities on the National Executive Committee (the party’s governing body), as well—God is in the details—as on the more obscure Conference Arrangements Committee (which helps shape the annual party conference).

And Labour’s MPs? Finally stung into action by what they saw as Corbyn’s failure to fight hard enough for the UK’s continued membership of the EU during the June 2016 referendum, they passed an overwhelming, if nonbinding, motion of no confidence in their leader. Corbyn ignored it, maintaining that his mandate derived from his party, not his MPs. A little later, he saw off a formal challenge to his leadership with a larger share of the vote than in 2015, proof—as if any were needed—that his party is not going to unseat him any time soon. Since then, some Corbynskeptic MPs have decided that they love Big Brother after all—a turnaround made easier by fear of unemployment, hope of advancement and Labour’s unexpectedly strong showing in the election the Tories called (and then nearly threw away last year).

But, to the left, many MPs remain—not unreasonably—suspect. In September 2017, there was a reduction in the percentage of the parliamentary party required to nominate a leadership candidate from that awkward 15 percent to 10 percent. Pressure on Corbynskeptic MPs has revved up at the constituency level, not least due to Momentum, a far-left group that emerged from Corbyn’s 2015 campaign with the aim of bolstering his leadership—Red Guards with a whiff of the Praetorian and a hint of the Alinsky about them. Now some 40,000 strong, Momentum has developed into a significant force in a party (its founder, Jon Lansman, was elected onto the National Executive Committee in January) it seems intent on radicalizing still further. Its members include skilled social media warriors but also those prepared to devote the time and, maybe, the venom it takes (there are persistent accusations of intimidation and bullying, online and, occasionally, off), to steer constituency parties—many of which are already more left-leaning than their MP—closer to the new orthodoxy, in some cases by picking Momentum-approved candidates for local elections and, of course, parliament.

More moderate Labour MPs must worry that ‘deselection‘ (as their party’s candidate for the next election) looms, leaving them facing the prospect of unemployment. Deselection is a powerful threat—that’s why Unite’s McCluskey, irritated by Labour MPs objecting to the undeniable strain of anti-Semitism (oh yes, there’s that too) running through some of the Corbynista left—recently wrote that he understood the “growing demand for mandatory reselection,” not the first time that he has mentioned this cudgel. Making every Labour MP go through this process would be an effective way of either purging rebels or bringing them to heel. For now, Corbyn’s political secretary is studying the party’s rulebook with a view to investigating how ‘party democracy’ can be improved. Mandatory selection might easily turn out to be one of her recommendations: MPs, said Corbyn in January this year, “should all be accountable all the time,” an innocuous statement except when it is not.

For their part, Conservatives went into 2017 feeling optimistic about their chances against a party that had so firmly turned its back on what was reckoned to be the center ground. The shock vote for Brexit had unquestionably thrown the Tory Party into disarray in June 2016 (Prime Minister Cameron had announced that he was stepping down), but Labour’s predicament appeared to be even worse. Within days of the referendum much of the shadow cabinet (and a slew of more junior shadow ministers) resigned, and then came that vote of no confidence.

Home Secretary (interior minister) Theresa May, wrongly seen as competent—but rightly regarded as the only realistic candidate after Boris Johnson sank without trace—speedily succeeded David Cameron as Tory leader and prime minister. When, in April 2017, she called a snap general election, the Conservatives were very comfortably ahead in the polls. The only question appeared to be by how much May could build on Cameron’s modest majority.

In the event, she wiped it out. May fought a campaign that was not only tin-eared and technically incompetent (there is this thing called social media, Theresa) but also actively self-destructive. For a party to issue a manifesto proposing a policy—quickly, accurately and lethally labeled a dementia tax—that targeted the savings of some of its most loyal supporters was… unwise. May managed to hang on in office thanks to an arrangement with Ulster’s Democratic Unionist Party, but she surrendered the political initiative to Labour, an initiative that, despite falling short of expectations in this year’s local elections, it essentially still enjoys.

There were scraps of comfort for the Tories: their slice of the vote was the highest since the election held in the afterglow of the Falklands War. However, the increase (over 9 percent) in Labour’s share was the party’s best since the 1945 landslide that tossed Winston Churchill out of office—suggesting that there was more to their success than May’s blunders. With hindsight, the way Corbyn had swept to the Labour leadership was a warning that was ignored. At the time his victory was widely regarded as a temporary aberration rather than understood for what it was: an indication of a wider, deeper discontent.

That misreading led the Tories (and many in Labour too) to assume that Corbyn’s party was unelectable, a calculation that rested firstly on presumptions about the electorate that proved to be false. Corbyn’s terrorist associations were ancient history to many voters, even if they knew about them in the first place. His fondness for foreign despots also mattered less than it should. To borrow from Neville Chamberlain’s infamous formulation, Brits showed little interest in the politics of “far away” countries involving “people of whom [they] know nothing.” Cuba? Nice beaches. In the early stages of the 2017 election, Unite (who else?) lent Andrew Murray, its chief of staff, to help toughen up Labour’s faltering campaign (which he duly did). A former journalist for the communist Morning Star (where Corbyn has been a frequent contributor), Murray had only just switched from the Communist Party to Labour. As if that was not enough, and adding some variety to by now routine attitudes to the Soviet past among some of Corbyn’s closest associates, Murray had expressed “solidarity” with “Peoples’ Korea.” Despite a brief media furor, none of this seemed to bother the voters either. This February Corbyn recruited Murray, who remains with Unite, as a part-time consultant.

Closer to home, the Conservatives (and, to be fair, Labour moderates) had failed to grasp that the political center was defined in one way in Westminster and in quite another in the country at large. The Conservatives were correct, on policy grounds, to attack Labour’s plans for the reversal of some of the privatizations of the past decades, but they were wrong to think that those plans would be viewed as extreme. According to a YouGov poll taken in the middle of the campaign, some two-thirds of respondents wanted to see the renationalization of the Royal Mail (post office), while 60 percent (including 44 percent of Tory supporters) favored the renationalization of the railway companies. Labour’s proposed tax increases on the top 5 percent played well too.

Where the real center of British politics now lies is hard to say, but, very broadly speaking, it has been moving to the left for a long time, not least under Blair (more radical than often realized)—a direction the Tories have been unable to reverse. Quite why this should be is complicated, but the growing diversity of the electorate is a part of it (the Conservatives have struggled to win over ethnic minorities, securing only an estimated 17 percent of their vote in 2017, and, a scandal this year over immigration is likely to make that task even more arduous). To go all Gramsci, the cultural hegemony of (various varieties of) the Left has also weighed heavily. That is true of the entertainment sector, broadcast media (the fundamentally center-left BBC remains the dominant news provider), the law, the National Health Service (and the perennial debate that surrounds it), education (approximately 8 percent of school teachers voted Conservative, and, as for the universities, well…) and in plenty of other areas besides.

The Tories had to contend with more immediate vulnerabilities too. Voters were weary of austerity (Labour promised much more spending, but tax increases would be focused on, of course, other people—the ‘rich’ and corporations, principally). Years of wage stagnation had also soured the mood. But the Conservatives’ most alarming weakness was generational. According to YouGov, they trounced Labour among the over fifties (with the size of their majority increasing with the age of the voter), but fell far short with everyone else. The younger the voter the worse the Tories did, partly because that’s almost always the case, partly because Britain’s cultural and demographic change is more pronounced in younger age cohorts, and partly because of the unlikely aura of cool surrounding Labour’s eccentric and seemingly benign grandpa, a performer so good, when it suits him, at concealing his inner steel—he divorced his second wife largely over her insistence on an ideologically inappropriate school for their son—that a swordstick would be impressed.

More substantively, high house prices, rising rents and stagnant wages are preventing many younger Britons from buying their own home (the added indebtedness caused by still bitterly resented university tuition fees, introduced at the end of the century and substantially hiked since, doesn’t help either: in its manifesto Labour undertook to scrap them). Home ownership rates are at their lowest level (around 63 percent) for thirty years, and it is the younger generation who have borne the brunt of that decline. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, home ownership rates for those between the age of 25–34 fell from 55 percent in 1996 to 34 percent in 2016.

“I want,” said Mrs. Thatcher in 1983, “a capital-owning democracy. Housing is the start. If you’re a man or woman of property, you’ve got something.” Her political logic was impeccable, and, for a long time, it worked. It could do so again, but there is no easy fix to the current mess. Instead, Generation Rent is left with its nose pressed against realtors’ windows—windows it must be tempted to smash. Without capital, the young won’t rally behind capitalism. Labour meanwhile promised a major boost to homebuilding and, regardless of how counterproductive they have historically been, tougher controls on landlords.

Then there’s Brexit. The majority of Cameron’s cabinet (including May) campaigned, with varying degrees of enthusiasm against it. But it was Cameron who called the referendum and most Conservatives voted for the break with Brussels. In the eyes of the electorate, Brexit is the Tories’ baby, and, after the referendum, the party hierarchy adopted it. “Brexit means Brexit,” proclaimed May. This brought the Conservatives some gains outside their traditional comfort zone, but protest votes by embittered Tory Remainers almost certainly cost them a greater number of seats within their affluent heartland, territory where people did not feel ‘left behind’ and were anxious about what Brexit could mean for business. Identification of the Conservatives as the Brexit party also widened the generation chasm, reinforcing the perception among younger voters, who generally supported Remain, that the Tories were the party of the past, Little Englanders and worse.

None of this accounts for the sudden collapse in Conservative support in the final weeks before the 2017 vote—that was due to the Tories’ self-inflicted wounds and an increasingly impressive Labour campaign—but it helps explain why it fell as far and as fast as it did.

The problem for the Conservatives in 2018 is that not much has changed. Their apparent reprieve in this year’s local elections will probably only be a temporary embarrassment for Corbyn. If May is lucky, it could transform a war of movement into one of attrition (at the time of writing, Corbyn’s personal approval ratings—never high—have slipped below May’s uninspiring tally), but the two sides remain dangerously closely matched: a Labour victory could be just one recession away (the next election is due in 2022). The current recovery, however lackluster, has already lasted a reasonably long time, something that ought to mean that a downturn is on the way—a downturn that would be accelerated, deepened and prolonged by a botched Brexit.

Anything written today about the form that Brexit eventually takes will be rapidly overtaken by events. Nevertheless, as matters now stand, the most straightforward solution, the more or less off-the-shelf ‘Norway option’ (leaving the EU, but remaining within the ‘Single Market’), a solution seemingly acceptable to Brussels, has been rejected by the British government, and, tellingly, not solely because of Brexit hardliners. May is still hunting a dream, a middle way that she likes (and can sell both to her parliamentary colleagues and the EU) between two election-losing alternatives, a highly disruptive ‘hard’ Brexit or one so ‘soft’ that trying to force it through splits her party, alienates former Labour Leavers—or both. Raising the stakes still further, if the EU rejects May’s final proposal, the UK will crash out of the union, resulting in a chaotic, hardest-of-all Brexits, a finale more electorally poisonous than all the rest.

Corbyn will try to sit tight, doing his best—it’s getting trickier—to maintain the artful ambiguity that has served him so well on Brexit. Whatever Remainer platitudes Labour’s ‘absolute boy’ may have muttered during the referendum, he has been a Brexiteer for decades, principally—whatever he may say about the matter—because he sees it as an obstacle to building a properly socialist state. But he is also well aware that some 70 percent of Labour voters wanted to stay in the EU, and that his party has, on balance, benefited from being viewed as the party of Remain.

In February, Corbyn recommended that the UK should enter into a customs union with the EU—something the Conservatives have, for what may be a very temporary now, rejected—but quit the Single Market. Politically that could achieve what Corbyn wants. It sends a useful signal to Remainers, leaves the Tories stuck in their Brexit mare’s nest and, should such a deal actually be struck, it would not block his designs on the economy. Corbyn is also under some pressure to help efforts to stay in the Single Market. In the implausible event he agreed, it would in all probability only be as a device to harass the Tories and only if there was no chance that his assistance would make a material difference. The (more or less) economically liberal discipline underpinning the Single Market cannot ultimately be reconciled with his longer-term vision for Britain.

Masterly inactivity comes with another advantage for Corbyn. It is presently envisaged that the UK’s formal departure from the EU in March 2019 will be followed by a transition period until December 2020. That date ensures that Brexit will still be fresh in the memories of many Remainers when they vote in the next general election, currently scheduled for May 2022. They will be angrier still if there is a recession between now and then. Rightly or wrongly, a downturn is, even if only partly, bound to be blamed on Brexit. Another risk for the Conservatives is that with Brexit a definitively done deal by the end of the transition period (even, if as is now being suggested, transitional customs arrangements are kept going past 2020) some Leavers who left Labour over Brexit may well feel that it is safe to return to the fold—especially if a recession has rekindled old class loyalties.

Away from the Brexit morass, the Conservatives still lack an adequate response to the challenges posed or exploited by Corbyn in 2017. A new leader might help, if only cosmetically, if someone suitable can be found. So far May has held on to her job for the same reason that she won it—the lack of a viable alternative. If she’s still heading the Tory ticket in 2022, it’s hard to see how the Conservatives can prevail even if they can organize (low bar) a somewhat less dreadful campaign than last time. They will have been in power for twelve years—an eon in an age of restless electorates. Keeping May at the top will be brutal confirmation that they are out of people as well as ideas.

The ideas they do have, criticized in one instance (but it applies more widely) as trying to beat Corbyn with Miliband, are likely to be expensive and hard to pay for. And that is without taking account, say, of the sharply rising cost of caring for a growing population of the old and the very old (the dementia tax was a bad answer to a good question). The electorate may have had enough of austerity, but the nation’s debt burden remains high (at around 87 percent of gdp), and increasing spending, even if interest rates stay low, is not a solution without political problems of its own.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives show few signs of knowing how to reverse the decline in the numbers of their ageing, shrinking party (one recent plan, a discount card for younger Tories with a chain of chicken restaurants, came to nothing). In 2017, the far larger—and energized—Labour Party was able to combine social media with boots on the ground to good effect. The Tories may be able to up their online game next time round, but, to quote Momentum’s Lansman, “elections are not won by air wars alone.” He’s right, but the way things are going, the main evidence of the Conservative Party’s presence on the sidewalks will be the whir of a walker’s wheels. Quite a few of those who voted for the party in 2017 won’t even survive long enough to manage that. Theoretically, the middle-aged of today—the old codgers of tomorrow—will replace them, growing more Conservative as they age. Theoretically.

It could be that the more people see of Corbyn, the more relaxed they will become about him. The Tories’ best hope may be that the opposite occurs. The longer that Corbyn (a potential prime minister now, not a no hoper) stays in close focus, the greater the chance that voters will come to understand that the extremist of yesteryear is the extremist of today and the extremist of tomorrow. They may not care that Corbyn palled around with Irish Republicans decades ago, but they didn’t like it when he equivocated over the Russian poison attack in March, in a manner hard, incidentally, to square with the exaggerated reputation for integrity that he enjoys. More generally, Corbyn’s underlying beliefs are quite some way to the left of many Labour voters (let alone voters merely looking in Labour’s direction), if not of his party. That will become ever clearer as time goes by. And the nervous will not be reassured by the high visibility of Corbyn’s more aggressive supporters. If his advisors are smart, Corbyn will campaign in 2022 on, by his standards, a moderate program. After all, if his MPs are either onside or under control—and, increasingly, they will be—he can do what he wants after he gets into power.

Britain has often been described as an elective dictatorship. It is a democracy with dismayingly few guardrails. The constitution is unwritten, legal protections are not as good as they might be, and departure from the EU will, for good and ill, remove another set of constraints on British governments’ freedom of maneuver. Prime Minister Corbyn will exploit this to the full. The red flag will not be flying over Buckingham Palace, but a Corbyn government will do everything it can to push through an agenda far more radical than anything contained in its election manifesto, with, perhaps, the run on the pound that will accompany its election as the excuse: capital controls would not be a surprise. ‘Emergency’ tax increases would not be a surprise. That will just be the beginning.

Such a government will use the institutions of the state to entrench its own position. What the Corbynistas have done to Labour, Labour will do to Britain. The return of state control over more and more of the economy—all duly approved by parliament—will give them many of the levers it will need to do just that (and, another instrument of power, the jobs to dole out to the faithful).

Over time, Labour’s opponents will be marginalized and targeted in ways that will begin, but not end, with the petty. Dissent will become more difficult. The UK is already too keen on criminalizing speech or an ‘inappropriate’ tweet. There will be worse, much worse, to come under a government led by a man who is visibly irritated by much of the press and has shown every sign of wanting to do something to rein it in. Momentum and other activist groups will also be on the beat to cow troublemakers into line.

If Labour wins, British democracy will not be what it was, the British economy will not be what it was and Britain’s alliances will not be what they were. It is ideologically consistent, although not forgivable, that Corbyn had a soft spot for the Soviet bloc, for Castro and for Chavez. But how to explain, say, the approach, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes merely helpful, taken by Corbyn (once an rt regular) to Vladimir Putin, no leftist? Then there were the friendly gestures towards the Iranian theocracy and, even, attempts to draw a form of moral equivalence between ISIS and the United States. It is not, it seems, just capitalism that Corbyn objects to, but the West in general, the United States in particular, and, of course, always, always Israel. Under the circumstances, the durability of Labour’s 2017 manifesto commitment to NATO, an organization Corbyn has always regarded with disdain, cannot be taken for granted. That is even more the case with the commitment to the renewal of Trident, Britain’s nuclear deterrent, a commitment passed without Corbyn’s support. Trident would not survive for long if Corbyn, a lifelong unilateral disarmer, ever made it to Number 10. NATO, an even touchier topic, might be a different matter. Rather than taking the highly perilous political risk of quitting outright, Labour would probably just allow Britain’s participation in the alliance to wither on the vine.

If I had to guess, helped by the miseries that are likely to dog the Conservatives over the next few years, Corbyn’s Labour will win the next election and either form (or, if it lacks an absolute majority) dominate the next government. If it does not, it will try again the next time round.

It only has to win once.

A Tragedy of Errors

The Weekly Standard, January 26, 2018

In July 2016, Theresa May won the Tory party leadership contest, and thus became the U.K.’s prime minister, for one simple reason. There was no one else. It was less than a month after the Brexit referendum had upended Britain’s political order. The only thing her predecessor, David Cameron, was running for was the exit. Her sole credible rival, Boris Johnson, long the party’s darling and the most prominent Conservative to campaign to leave the E.U.—May had been a tactically tepid “Remainer”—was the favorite for the job. But he was felled in a botched coup by his most important ally, Michael Gove, a Leaver with laughable dreams of 10 Downing Street himself.

And the lack of a credible alternative is why May is still at her post. In April 2017, she called a snap election intended to strengthen her hand in advance of Brexit negotiations that instead cost her the modest majority she had inherited from Cameron. The Conservatives can now govern only thanks to the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists. But Johnson remains tainted by the referendum’s rancid aftermath and has not shone in his role as foreign minister. No other electorally plausible challenger has emerged.

“She’s just not up to it,” one former Tory M.P. told me over Christmas—and he is far from alone in that thinking. To be burdened both by a second-rate leader and the complications of minority government would be hard going for the Conservatives at the best of times. These are anything but. Brexit is an immense economic, legal, and diplomatic task made infinitely more difficult by a political environment for which May must take the lion’s share of the blame.

By squandering the Tories’ majority in an ill-planned and tin-eared election campaign, May not only turned the parliamentary arithmetic against her but also trashed the aura of authority that had come with her leadership victory just the year before. A lame duck who is allowed to limp on remains a lame duck. Most ominously of all, the Tories’ poor performance made a mockery of the assumption that a Labour party led by the far-left Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable and has only accelerated his takeover of Britain’s main opposition party. In Britain, the opposition is rarely more than a recession or a fiasco away from government. With a bungled Brexit offering the prospect of both, betting against a Corbyn premiership would be unwise.

Brexit, the reversal of over 40 years of ever-deeper integration with the E.U., will be easy enough to bungle. Those four decades cannot be wished away. The Gordian solution, simply quitting the E.U. and trading with the bloc under the rules set by the World Trade Organization, is not as straightforward as the hardest Brexiteers are wont to claim. Such an arrangement would not, said the director general of the WTO in November, be “the end of the world,” and he should know. Nevertheless, its impact on the country’s intricate connections with the global economy would come with consequences that no one should wish to see.

Besides, it’s unlikely that such a stark break is what the majority of those who voted for Brexit wanted. The question posed by the referendum was deceptively simple: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” A vote to leave was a vote to leave, just that: It said nothing about the relationship that the country should maintain with Brussels after Brexit. The polling on this topic is muddled, and plenty of politicians have their own self-serving interpretations of what the voters “really meant,” but in the end it has been left to May’s government to resolve what Britain should aim for.

A starting point might have been recognition of the extraordinary rancor that the referendum has left in its wake. The vote was close: 52 to 48. Many Remainers— the more upscale voting bloc, with a higher percentage of those Britons used to getting their way—believe that they were robbed. A referendum, they argue, was not the way to decide such a complex matter, and the case for Brexit was dishonestly made. A smarter government would have acknowledged the strength and persistence of Remainer sentiment as it decided its next move.

That’s not what May did. To the extent that the Tories’ post-referendum strategy consisted of anything more than bickering amongst themselves (they are divided over the nature of the deal that should be cut with the E.U.), soundbites (“Brexit means Brexit”), and wishful thinking (claiming that countries were “queueing up” to do trade deals with Britain), they behaved as if 52 percent was a much larger slice of the pie than conventional arithmetic would suggest.

The most obvious solution was the “Norway option,” a shift to the status enjoyed by Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein, who are outside the E.U. but inside the “Single Market.” This is the plan that might have eased the anger of many Remainers. But May ruled it out, fearing trouble from her party’s hard Brexiteers and, perhaps even more, that accepting “Norwegian” immigration rules risked alienating blue-collar voters—especially those she hoped would follow up on their support for Brexit by switching more permanently from Labour to the Tories.

Despite encouraging noises from Brussels, there were some decent arguments against pinning too much hope on the Norway option. Perhaps the most important stems from the conflict between the E.U.’s insistence on the free movement of workers and British unease over immigration. Theoretically, the Norway option offers a significant exception (essentially an “emergency brake”) to the right of residents to move between Single Market states, which is not available to E.U. members. A British announcement that it was prepared to take full advantage of that exception might have sold the Norway option back home—though equally might have sunk it in Brussels. May’s speedy rejection of the Norway option means that we will never know. As so often during Britain’s long European entanglement, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that its government did not know what it was doing.

May’s failure to reach out to at least some of the 48 percent cost her party dearly in last year’s election. The Conservatives were hit hard by the defections of aggrieved Remainers in the affluent south, defections that lost them more seats than the number they gained due to increased support from Leave voters elsewhere. There’s been no recent British election more necessary not to get wrong. Instead, the Conservatives have set the stage for a drama in which their weak parliamentary position could easily combine with a bad Brexit deal and the growing strength of the hard-left Labour opposition to create a historic catastrophe.

There are many paths to disaster, but the central concern must revolve around the lack of a Conservative majority. May can insist on little in London and less in Brussels. And time is not on her side. When she filed notice under Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon on March 29 last year, formally beginning the U.K.’s exit from the E.U., she did so without any clear notion of the type of Brexit she either wanted or could realistically expect to negotiate. Nonetheless, she started the clock running. She should have waited until she was ready: If the U.K. has not finalized the terms of its divorce from Brussels and (not the same thing) agreed on the basis of at least an interim relationship with its ex by March 29, 2019, it will crash chaotically out of the E.U. The economic and political damage would take years to clean up.

That said, in December, Brussels and London agreed that they had made “sufficient progress” on a divorce settlement to turn the discussion to their relationship after Brexit. They reached this milestone by coming to agreement on the rights of E.U. citizens in the U.K. (and, up to a point, vice versa) as well as a basis for calculating how much the U.K. must pay (probably around $55 billion) to satisfy its existing obligations to the E.U. They have also found sufficiently vague and sufficiently optimistic wording to keep alive the fantasy (made more fanciful still by the rejection of the Norway option) that the whole of the U.K. can quit both the Single Market and the E.U.’s customs union without the necessity of reintroducing a hard border between Northern Ireland (part of the U.K.) and the Irish Republic (an E.U. member). Such a border would not only be economically disruptive in its own right but also cut through the blurring of divisions on the Emerald Isle that British and Irish membership in the E.U. had made possible and, as such, could represent a threat to the hard-won peace enjoyed since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. More prosaically, it could trigger an Irish veto of a deal on the U.K.’s future relationship with the E.U., which will have to be approved by all the member countries.

Yet this is to assume there will be something to veto: But there is no chance of the U.K.’s both agreeing on and implementing its post-Brexit relationship with the E.U. by the 2019 deadline. At this point even the simpler Norway option couldn’t be adopted in time. As a result, the E.U. and U.K. are discussing a “transition period” during which Britain will be a de facto member of the E.U. without having any say in how it is run. It will be a rule-taker, not a rule-maker, which will infuriate harder-line Brexiteers, and not only them. May will have to watch her M.P.s carefully.

Quite when the basis of this transition agreement will be settled is unclear (the U.K. is hoping by the end of March)—as is what is required before it can enter into legal force. What does seem to be agreed is that it will last about two years. To think this will be time enough—trade deals are complex beasts, and this one has to be agreed on by 28 countries—is optimistic. It is just as likely that all the transition will achieve is to push the cliff’s edge two years into the future.

If Britain fails to close a mutually satisfactory deal by this new deadline, it’s uncertain whether it will be permitted to linger on in that humiliating transitional status while it renews its efforts to work something out. Britain’s increasingly uncomfortable position (and an approaching general election) might well mean that it is forced to accept the alternative identified by the E.U.’s chief negotiator last year, some variation of the bloc’s free-trade deal with Canada, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)—a deal, incidentally, that took seven years to negotiate.

A “Canadian” solution would still have to be squared with the Irish border conundrum and would raise tricky legal and political issues arising out of the “most favored nation” status that various countries, including Canada, enjoy as a result of their E.U. trade deals if the U.K. tries for a sweetened deal. And it will: CETA’s benefits include eliminating some 98 percent of tariffs, knocking down barriers on bidding for public contracts, and easing rules on temporary transfers of workers, but it doesn’t have much impact on non-tariff barriers to traded goods, nor will it liberalize the trade in services, two areas of particular British concern.

The precise form an improvement might take remains elusive. More than 18 months after the referendum Britons know what May doesn’t want (Norway or Canada) but are left to guess at the nature of the “bespoke and comprehensive” deal she is looking to wrest from Brussels. Nervous about divisions within her party and unwilling to explain to the British public how hard a hard Brexit could be, May has been long on platitudes (a “deep and special relationship,” our “strongest friend and partner”) and short on precision.

Within her cabinet, the key division is between those, such as finance minister Philip Hammond, who want a deal effectively based on maintaining close regulatory alignment with the E.U. and those, such as Johnson, looking for a broad agreement that nevertheless gives the U.K. freedom to diverge from the E.U.’s regulatory structure. David Davis, the underwhelming “Brexit minister,” has recently edged closer to the Hammond camp. He has previously called for “Canada plus plus plus,” and an “overarching” deal. If that remains his goal, fairly close regulatory alignment will be part of it.

Where all these approaches overlap is in the desire to include services in any deal and to make trade with the E.U. as “frictionless” as possible. The latter ambition recognizes that potential barriers to trade can extend far beyond tariffs. They can, for example, include regulatory roadblocks and literal ones too: That long line at customs can wreak havoc.

As for the former, it’s not hard to understand: Services account for some 80 percent of Britain’s GDP and made up 38 percent of its exports to the E.U in 2016. The U.K. reported a $19 billion trade surplus in services with the E.U. the same year. It’s worth noting, because they will be a major presence on any British wish list presented to Brussels, that financial services, even narrowly defined, make up roughly 8 percent of the country’s economy, and that’s before the boost they give to other businesses, such as law, accounting, real estate, and, naturally, restaurants. Meas-ured by the trade surplus it generates, finance is the U.K.’s most successful services export.

London clearly accepts that any agreement will involve trade-offs (less alignment means less access and so on). That’s realistic enough, but the British government’s insistence that a favorable special deal is within the U.K.’s reach is not.

The E.U. sells many more goods to Britain than it imports: a surplus of $133 billion in 2016. This ought to offer an incentive to strike a more attractive deal with the U.K. (the sixth-largest economy in the world, after all) than Brussels is suggesting, including sufficiently generous provision for services. But to many members of the E.U., Britain’s negotiating stance looks like an attempt to have its cake and to eat it. Seen through continental eyes, infamously perfidious Albion is trying to grab privileged access to the Single Market without meeting the obligations that go with it, including, of course, the rules governing who can settle on the skeptic isle.

For the E.U. to accept such a regime would be regarded as a wasted commercial opportunity (especially the chance to take business from the much envied, much resented City of London). But the political hit would be worse, and in the trudge to “ever-closer union,” politics trumps economics. The notion that “the four freedoms”—the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labor—underpinning the Single Market are indivisible is, to Brussels, an essential element in the building of a united Europe. Its leadership won’t want to set a precedent by handing the Brits a deal that might encourage other malcontents to head for the exit ramp.

Those who ask why this should count for so much to Britain—many countries trade quite happily with the E.U. without being part of the Single Market—need to remember that the E.U. is the U.K.’s closest neighbor and largest customer (in 2016 it accounted for 43 percent of U.K. exports). If Britain leaves the Single Market, its access to it will, by definition, deteriorate. That’s a very different trading challenge from the one faced by a country like, say, the United States, which has long since learned to make do with an imperfect trading relationship with the E.U. The suspension in 2017 of negotiations on a possible U.S.-E.U. free-trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, may have been a setback for free trade, but it didn’t make life any more difficult for American companies.

By contrast, Brexit will change Britain’s economic relationship with the E.U. for the worse (and this, whatever hard Brexiteers might believe, will not be compensated for by expanded trade elsewhere any time soon). This is not just a matter of British companies risking a decline in their business in Europe. Over the decades, the U.K. has successfully exploited its comparatively deregulated economy to be a useful conduit for international companies wanting frictionless—that word again—expansion into the E.U. and a valued host to a valuable part of increasingly integrated European supply chains. Much of this business is well enough established to survive even a somewhat unsatisfactory Brexit deal, but it will struggle to grow.

All of this is good news for Labour. The weaker the economy, the greater the chance that Jeremy Corbyn can win a general election—the next is set for 2022, if the Tories can hang on that long. And the greater the chance that Corbyn will win, the less confident business will become, weakening the economy still further in a vicious circle that, with every turn, brings an extremist closer to 10 Downing Street. Labour is already polling slightly ahead of the Conservatives. The economy is slowing (GDP growth is forecast to decline to 1.4 percent in 2018, after approximately 1.6 percent last year), in part, I suspect, due to worries over Brexit, worries that the current confusion is doing nothing to alleviate. The Tories’ approach to Brexit is giving the entirely accurate impression of a party that is both divided and incompetent. Meanwhile, Remainers remain enraged, and the closer the end of the transition period comes to 2022, the fresher that rage will be. The hard left is licking its chops.

If Labour does prevail, there will be little that is moderate about the way it governs. Scarcely two years since Corbyn unexpectedly became its leader, the party has been transformed. An eccentric fanatic, he may not be the brightest, but he and his coterie have shown a sharp grasp of how to make the most of the opportunity he was so carelessly given. What mattered, they realized, was to take control of the Labour party, long the principal alternative to the Conservatives, and wait for the election victory that will come its way when voters want the Tories out—as one day they are bound to. Much of the party’s organization, including its commanding heights, has been taken over by the hard left. There has not so much been a long march through the institution as a blitzkrieg. The large number of new members who joined the party either to vote for Corbyn or to rally behind him have stood by their man, and Labour moderates in Parliament (still quite a large group) have largely been reduced to unhappy acquiescence.

Whatever he said in 2016, Corbyn, the leader of a party that supported Remain, has always favored withdrawal from the E.U. His halfheartedness during the referendum campaign, in one of the many ironies of that vote, almost certainly put Leave over the top. To Corbyn, the E.U. is an obstacle to socialism, and these days he is barely bothering to conceal what he really thinks (unlike an overwhelming majority of Labour party members, he opposes remaining in the Single Market). Despite his party’s commitment to “respecting” the referendum result, Labour has—through mood music, creative ambiguity, and the occasional tantalizing hint—managed to retain much of its appeal to Remainers. It is the Tories who are tarred with Brexit.

Many Conservatives who defected last year to punish their party for Brexit may be worried enough about the possibility of a Corbyn victory to come home the next time round, but that’s unlikely to be enough to save the day. In particular, under-45s have turned on a Tory party they see as old-fashioned (to many of them Brexit is an exercise in ill-judged, and probably racist, nostalgia), out-of-touch, and uncaring. Throw in wage stagnation, a housing market that makes it prohibitively expensive to buy, and an absence of historical memory of where the hard left, including Jeremy Corbyn, were trying to take Britain in the late 1970s, and it’s hard to see them changing their minds by 2022. That’s something of which business is also well aware, with the result that the vicious circle will make yet another turn.

Under the circumstances, if the Tories continue to handle Brexit in the way they are now doing, Britain will be Corbyn’s for the taking. Whether he would give it back is an interesting question.

Corbyn or ‘Soft Brexit’: Choose One

National Review Online, June 12, 2017

Theresa May has just three key matters to attend to in what ought to be the death throes of her shattered premiership. The first is to cut a deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party good enough to give her a de facto, if precarious, parliamentary majority. As I write, that’s nearly, probably, maybe there. The second is either to postpone the first round of the Brexit talks with the EU (due to start in a few days) or to ensure that they proceed without any blow-ups. The third is to announce that she is resigning as leader of the Conservative party and will leave 10 Downing Street as soon as her successor is chosen.  

As she sorts through the statistics of her defeat — and even if the Tories emerged as the largest party, it was a defeat — there are some scraps of comfort. The Conservatives’ share of the vote (42.5 percent) was the highest since the 43.9 percent that Margaret Thatcher, still basking in Falklands glory, secured in 1983, and the Tories did better than they had in Scotland for a very, very long time, thanks mainly to the efforts of its charismatic Scottish leader, Ruth Davidson, someone who both adapted Conservatism to local conditions while preserving its essence and, while she was at it, helped take a second Scottish independence referendum off the agenda for quite some time.

But none of this counts for much when measured against the scale of the disaster that May has inflicted on her party and on her country. She has thrown away a small, if not entirely reliable, majority and (if she’s lucky) replaced it with a fragile less-than-coalition. She has greatly complicated the treacherous Brexit process. She has squandered one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest legacies: The hard Left is now dangerously close to power. Labour won some 40 percent of the vote last week, its highest share since Tony Blair’s heyday, an era when it was a very different party.

Calling a snap election was a forgivable gamble, forgivable because it looked like a safe bet. Burdened by an extremist and in some cases none too bright leadership, Labour was vulnerable. A popular figure (particularly when compared with Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn), May seemed set for a substantially increased majority, maybe even a landslide, something that would have strengthened her hand at home during the Brexit negotiations.

 Meanwhile, pushing out her mandate to 2022 would buy her potentially valuable breathing space. Under the timetable set in motion when May gave notice under Article 50 of the EU treaty in March (an act of extraordinary irresponsibility if she was already contemplating an election), the two sides have two years to work out the terms of their divorce (which does not, incidentally, include sorting out what their post-separation relationship should look like). If they don’t come to terms, there is (in the absence of an extension or transitional agreement) simply a break, after which trade between the UK and the EU would be governed by, to use the shorthand, WTO rules. Whatever some Brexiteers like to claim, that would not be a happy state of affairs. There are signs that uncertainty over what may lie ahead is beginning to unsettle business. That uncertainty — exacerbated by May’s unwise decision to opt for a “hard Brexit” rather than one of the gentler “prix fixe” alternatives — will weaken the economy, at least for a while. May presumably calculated that by 2022 the worst of this turbulence would be behind her.

A gamble is still a gamble. Good odds are no reason for carelessness, for stupidity, or for hubris. May’s campaign displayed all three in abundance. One survey has shown that 57 percent of Labour voters swung behind the party in the last month before the vote, 26 percent in the final few days. To butcher a storied Sun headline: It was the campaign wot lost it.

Among many blunders there were two that stood out. The first was proposing changes to the rules governing state-funded “social care” (including plans for a predatory “dementia tax”) that were seen as an attack on the elderly (typically among the Conservatives’ most loyal supporters), especially those who had the effrontery to own their own homes and the desire to pass something on to their children, achievements and aspirations that once were at the core of Thatcherism. It was a gesture that might not have delighted those children either: According to one poll, 50 percent of 35- to 44-year-olds voted Labour, but only 30 percent for the Conservatives.

Throw in the suggested changes to a free schools meal program and, in just a few self-destructive paragraphs in a manifesto that was ill-conceived enough as it was, May had revived the legend — one of the most powerful in British politics — of the Tories as the “nasty party” (a phrase, ironically enough, that she had made famous).

Then there was the decision to base so much of the campaign on May. Say what you will about Stalin and Mao, mass murderers and all that, but they earned their personality cults. May, by contrast, had been prime minister for less than a year, and before that a home secretary (interior minister) whose time in office was notable primarily for its longevity and failures over immigration. What’s more, by becoming the centerpiece of her own campaign, May seemed to repudiate some of the qualities that Brits most appreciated about her — understatedness and, by politicians’ standards, self-effacement. Then, in a cruel paradox, she was brought low when those aspects of her character proved to be all too genuine. Awkward in the spotlight, she stalked from Potemkin event to Potemkin event, too grand or too unsure of herself (take your pick) for debate and serious questioning. Voters were offered the repetition of slogans (“strong and stable leadership”) and evasive sound bites that grew emptier and more embarrassing by the day. She was a more likable robot than Hillary Clinton, but one with even less vim.    

She also chose the wrong battleground, casting herself as the defender of the Brexit she had (tepidly) opposed, a battle that has already been won. (Most Britons now accept, if in many cases reluctantly, the referendum’s outcome.) And she did so not solely on the strength of her (much bragged-about but largely untested) negotiating skills, but also by promising that she would be going for a “hard Brexit.” That includes withdrawal from the “single market” in which Norway and other non–EU members happily participate, a promise that would not only prove economically expensive but also cost May dearly at the polls. Yes, the half-truth that “hard Brexit” would be hard on immigration delivered the Tories votes and some seats in working-class areas not previously known for their enthusiasm for May’s party, but the extra twist of the knife it applied to resentful Remainers in the south of England cost the Conservatives more.

With the Tories facing a Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn, this was an election that needed to be about more than Brexit and May’s managerial skills. Corbyn, a man of the hard Left, an extremist ably backed by extremists rather brighter than he is, should have been confronted on his record and on his ideology. But despite some tabloid venom, Corbyn was treated by the Tories with disdain rather than subjected to the more forensic treatment that was called for. The result was that this courteous fanatic was able to get away with being repackaged as a genial old codger, progressive, pleasantly eccentric, and principled. The last, at least, was true, but those principles — atavistic, intolerant, and irreconcilable with respectable democratic practice — were never properly examined. To be sure, a good number of people liked what they saw of Corbyn’s program, but many were either beguiled by its mood music — “hope,” “fairness,” an end to “austerity” — or just used a vote for him as a vehicle to express annoyance with May and a more general resentment, sometimes justified (for example, real wage growth has been dismal for years), sometimes not.

That resentment is strongest among young voters, and it delivered them to Labour. Convinced that coffin-dodgers and boomers are robbing them of their future, whether by voting for Brexit or by imposing tuition charges for university or by driving up house prices beyond their reach, “generation rent” hit back, its choice of weapon — a vote for Labour — unaffected, willfully or otherwise, by any understanding of Corbyn’s past association with terrorism or, for that matter, of where his brand of socialism will lead, an ignorance reinforced by left-wing bias in the educational system and a convenient forgetfulness of what the 1970s were really like.

This rejection by the young means trouble for the Tories for a long time. But they have horrifying short-term problems to contend with too. Should May’s government fall any time soon, the momentum behind Labour is likely to sweep Corbyn into power. The most immediate threats revolve around Brexit and the search for a new Tory leader, two closely connected conundrums. Whatever she might think or hope, Theresa May is finished, and her party does not have much time to find a replacement. The idea that May would ever be able to negotiate a satisfactory “hard Brexit” was always, to put it mildly, unconvincing, but with the EU fully aware of her weakness, it’s now impossible. And there is no fallback. May has argued for a while now that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” a characteristically vacuous argument that sidesteps the distressing reality that “no deal” (which would mean trading under those WTO rules) is a bad deal, a very bad deal indeed.

A breakdown of the Brexit talks would create chaos in Parliament and trigger the election that would take Corbyn to Number 10. As mentioned above, May should, given the circumstances, try to suspend the negotiations for now, and there were signs over the weekend that the EU is expecting just that. Failing that, begin the talks, and do everything possible to keep them going. In the meantime, the Tories must pick a new leader, a process complicated by the small matter that, at the time of writing, the incumbent shows little sign of wanting to go. But assuming that she can be prevailed upon to accept the inevitable, there are a number of alternatives.    

Naturally there is talk that Boris Johnson (the former mayor of London and current foreign secretary) is “on maneuvers.” Naturally, he has denied it. But Johnson has been left badly tarnished — a joker turned into a knave — by his role in the Brexit campaign and the turmoil that followed it. He’d be unlikely to tempt errant Tory voters back into the fold, and as he appears to be loathed by much of the EU leadership, his chances of striking a decent Brexit deal would be minimal. David Davis, the tough and intelligent Brexit minister, would normally be someone to consider, but his bewildering failure to master his EU brief ought to rule him out — although it may not. In the last few days Davis has, intriguingly, edged — just a bit — away from hard Brexit. Ruth Davidson’s triumph in Scotland saved May on Election Day, but she still has plenty to do in her home country. She has also said that she’s not interested in the national leadership, for which she’s not, in any event, eligible (as she doesn’t sit in the British parliament). Davidson, who like most of her compatriots favored remaining in the EU, has now suggested that the Tories should consult with other parties on the shape that Brexit should take. Those other parties would probably run a mile, but in principle she’s not wrong.

If I were in a position to choose the next Conservative leader, I’d either skip a generation and opt for, say, a promising up-and-comer such as Priti Patel or — spoiler alert, crazy thoughts ahead — perhaps look for a Nixon to go to China. Ken Clarke may be 76, a euro-fundamentalist and a man on the Tory left, but he was an effective chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), and he’s a well-liked figure both in the UK and, I would imagine, within the EU’s hierarchy. If Clarke could be persuaded to stand (unlikely) and to endorse a soft Brexit (maybe less unlikely), he — or if not him someone of similar views, such as Dominic Grieve (a former attorney general, respected in Parliament on both sides of the aisle and a holder of the Légion d’honneur, no less) — might be best placed to deliver the “soft Brexit” (of which the ‘Norway option” continues to be the best variant) that is the only realistic way for the country and the Tory party to get out of the current mess.

Even suggesting those last two individuals (however improbable it is that they would want the job) will shock euroskeptic readers, but whoever the new Conservative leader turns out to be, the reality of what lies ahead is clear. Corbyn or “soft Brexit”: Choose one.