Speaking before dawn at Conservative Party headquarters this morning, Boris Johnson celebrated “a huge, great stonking mandate” from the British people, after his party won an overwhelming victory in yesterday’s election. The Conservatives now have three hundred and sixty-four members of Parliament—a majority of almost eighty over the the other parties—and enormous freedom to govern for the next five years. The vote is a turning point. It is the best result for the Tories since 1987, and the first time since the days of Margaret Thatcher that the Party has decisively won the argument about the future of the country. The argument, of course, was about Brexit, at least for Johnson. “Get Brexit Done,” was his slogan and sole focus. For Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, whose election manifesto was anything but myopic—an eye-catching grab-bag of progressive ideas to address inequality and climate change, arranged around a complicated Brexit policy—this was a disaster. The party held on to just two hundred and three seats in the House of Commons, its worst result since the Depression, and more or less in line with the defeat of Michael Foot, its most recent radical left-wing leader, in 1983. Foot’s election manifesto was memorably described as “the longest suicide note in history.” This morning, Corbyn said that he would not lead Labour into its next election, but hinted that he would stick around for “a period of reflection,” while the Party figures out what to do. Johnson was more succinct. “We have defeated Corbyn,” he said.
It was a terrible night for the United Kingdom. Johnson and the Conservatives can look forward to great power in London for the coming years, but Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and Wales increasingly look like nations coming apart. The Scottish National Party, which opposes Brexit and wants independence, won forty-eight out of fifty-nine seats in Scotland. The Party’s leader, Nicola Sturgeon, said that she would write to Johnson before Christmas to request another referendum to break the union with England, which has lasted for three hundred and twelve years. “I have a mandate to give Scotland a choice for an alternative future,” she said. One nationalism breeds another. In Northern Ireland, which under Johnson’s Brexit deal will be separated from mainland Britain by a regime of customs checks, the Conservatives’ former allies, the Democratic Unionist Party, lost two of its ten seats. The D.U.P.’s veteran leader in Parliament, Nigel Dodds, lost his seat, in North Belfast, to John Finucane, a Sinn Fein candidate whose father was murdered by pro-union terrorists during the Troubles. “North Belfast rejects Brexit,” Finucane said. “North Belfast is a Remain constituency and wants a future as part of the European Union.” Johnson must now hold a creaking entity together. This morning, he described the Conservatives as “a great one-nation party,” meaning that they represent the whole of the U.K. But there is only one nation where Brexit and Johnson’s populism have truly flourished, and that is England. There the map is Conservative blue.
The questions for Labour are existential. Under Tony Blair, the Party merged its historic base in Scotland and the industrial north of England with metropolitan liberals and floating commuter voters in the south. Two elections ago, in 2015, the S.N.P. virtually banished Labour from Scotland, stripping the Party of around forty M.P.s. Last night, Labour lost another fifty-nine seats, this time in former mining and manufacturing communities across the north, where it had dominated the vote since the First World War. In Blyth Valley, a constituency north of Newcastle, the Conservatives won for the first time since 1950, when the electoral district was created. In Blair’s old parliamentary seat of Sedgefield, the Labour vote collapsed by seventeen per cent. The new M.P., Paul Howell, is the first Conservative to represent the town since 1931. Many of the seats that Labour lost were in parts of the country that voted to leave the European Union three years ago. This morning, Johnson acknowledged that, in places like Burnley, Bassetlaw, and Bishop Auckland, which has voted for Liberal and Labour M.P.s since 1885, people had turned to the Conservatives to deliver Brexit. The Prime Minister described leaving the E.U. as now the “irrefutable, irresistible, unarguable decision of the British people.” He said that he would work flat-out to enact it. “You may intend to return to Labour next time round,” Johnson said. “If that is the case, I am humbled that you have put your trust in me, and I will never take your support for granted.”
But Brexit alone does not explain Labour’s weak performance. Since 2016, the Party has stretched and strained to accommodate its traditional supporters, many of whom voted for Brexit. Corbyn himself is no fan of the E.U. The trouble is that Labour’s demographic coalition—the British equivalent of the group that the Democratic Party must hold together in 2020—is losing its glue. Corbyn’s metropolitan socialism, his big-ticket nationalizations and green industrial strategy, did not cut it in communities that had voted Labour for generations. They were ideas that came from somewhere else. In Bolsover, Derbyshire, Dennis Skinner, Labour’s eighty-seven-year-old M.P., had held office since before his Conservative opponent was born. Like seventy per cent of his constituents, Skinner supported Brexit. But he lost by more than five thousand votes. Mark Fletcher, who won the seat for the Tories, told the Financial Times that Corbyn’s unpopularity had been decisive. “Anti-Corbyn sentiment was the biggest thing I picked up on the doorstep,” Fletcher said. “Brexit would be number two. Number three would be the sense of not being listened to, taken for granted.”
What does Johnson’s victory mean? In short order, it means that the debate over Brexit, which has traumatized British politics for the past three and a half years, is over. With a compliant House of Commons, Johnson will take the country out of the E.U. on January 31st. He will also have considerable leeway in the trade negotiations that follow. Johnson has promised to settle a new free-trade deal with the E.U. by the end of 2020. Most experts and diplomats agree that this is impossible, but Johnson will have a rancorous British Parliament cheering him on. No one on the right will stand up to him. Everyone else will hope that a softer, less divisive Johnson will emerge, now that he has been elected Prime Minister by the population as a whole. This morning, there has already been speculation that Johnson will use his margin of victory to pivot to the center—negotiating a close partnership with the E.U. and governing as a moderate—but this is based on nothing at all. Rejoicing at Conservative Party headquarters, Johnson sounded almost dazed by what had happened. “We must now understand the earthquake we have created, the way in which we have changed the political map of this country,” he said. “We must grapple with the consequences of that.” President Trump tweeted his congratulations, teasing the offer of “a massive new Trade Deal after BREXIT” to the U.K. Those entreaties will be hard to resist, as will the political instincts that have carried Johnson this far. During the campaign, he made strikingly few promises—there was Brexit, some more police, a few new hospitals—and nothing much else. Johnson has achieved a momentous political triumph through discord, populism, and a few bon mots. Why on earth would he stop now?
