Boris Johnson has big lead in UK election. That might not mean much

It was shaping up as an ordinary day of campaigning in Britain’s extraordinary general election.

Mark Landler and Stephen CastleThe New York Times
Published : 2 Nov 2019, 09:52 AM
Updated : 2 Nov 2019, 09:52 AM

Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited a primary school in Suffolk where he showed children old pictures of London and told them about the days when rulers “used to stick the decapitated heads of the enemies on spikes.” His opponent, Jeremy Corbyn, promised a crowd in London that the Labour Party would never sell out Britain’s National Health Service to greedy American companies.

Then, shortly after 6pm Thursday, Nigel Farage, the insurgent leader of the Brexit Party, welcomed a special guest to his national radio show: President Donald Trump, calling in from Washington to disparage Corbyn and urge Johnson to forge a hard-line pro-Brexit alliance with Farage.

In less than 30 minutes of drive-time banter, Trump had utterly scrambled the narrative, dominating the next day’s headlines, giving Farage and his fringe party much-needed oxygen and reminding analysts that nothing in this six-week campaign is likely to go as the soothsayers predict.

“Looking at the polling as it is today, the Conservatives are going to win, and win big,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “But the polls looked like this in 2017, and it all evaporated for the Conservatives by the time people voted.”

In that election, Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, set herself the goal of expanding her parliamentary majority. But she proved to be a poor campaigner, and by the time it was over, she was left with a minority government that hobbled her in Brexit negotiations with the European Union and ultimately doomed her withdrawal plan.

Johnson is viewed as a better campaigner than May. He plans to run on a simple message: Get Brexit done quickly, under the agreement he negotiated with the European Union, so that Britain can embark on a shiny future of profitable trade deals with the United States and other countries.

Yet he, too, is a hostage to fortune, facing the danger that the narrative may shift unpredictably and in ways that hurt the Conservative Party.

Something like that occurred in Farage’s interview with Trump, when the president said that Johnson’s Brexit deal would foreclose the possibility of a trade agreement with the United States. That undercut Johnson, who has made such a deal a major selling point for his plan and, indeed, the country’s future.

Other dangers lurk, particularly in Britain’s winner-take-all electoral system, where the small Brexit Party could act as a spoiler, draining away just enough votes in enough closely contested districts to swing the balance of power in Parliament toward Labour.

“Of course he’s popular,” Farage said of Johnson on Friday, “but he doesn’t own the Brexit vote.”

Trump’s intervention on behalf of Farage is not likely to turn his party into a major player, but it has emboldened him to renew his demand that the Conservatives form an alliance with him and abandon the current Brexit deal.

And if Johnson does not agree, he said Friday, the Brexit Party will field 500 candidates in the election, which could split the pro-Brexit vote and cost the Tories several close seats.

Farage could also hammer Johnson for failing to pull Britain out of the European Union on Oct. 31, as he promised, or for his deal with Brussels, which Farage claims will align Britain too closely with Europe and, as Trump said, impede a trade deal with the United States.

“It’s all about control of the narrative,” said Timothy Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “If Johnson can keep the message on getting Brexit done, and if Corbyn can’t counter with his anti-austerity, populist message, the Conservatives will probably win.”

Johnson is starting out with an undisputed advantage. A poll released Thursday by Ipsos MORI showed the Conservatives leading Labour by 41% to 24% nationally. That would translate into a 108-seat Conservative majority in Parliament, according to Travers. These are the kind of numbers that emboldened Johnson to call an election now.

The Conservative Party is going after a swath of Labour seats in northern England and the Midlands, where people voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum and are frustrated that it has not happened.

The party has identified a target voter, named “Workington Man,” for the coastal town of Workington, in northwest England, which is surrounded by remnants of the coal and steel industries. He is older, white, not college-educated, a lover of the rugby league and a Labour voter who supported leaving the European Union and feels left behind by the Britain of today.

These voters care more about economic security than individual liberty. They favour putting additional police on the streets and toughening immigration policies, according to a study by the right-wing think tank Onward, which coined the phrase Workington Man.

The problem for Johnson is that he has staffed his Cabinet with politicians who favour deregulation and free trade, viewing Britain’s future less as a Tory welfare state than as an agile free agent in the global economy — Singapore-on-Thames, to use the popular shorthand.

How Johnson reconciles Singapore-on-Thames with Workington Man will be one of the tensions of the election.

Corbyn’s Labour Party is saddled with an even more muddled message on Brexit: It wants to negotiate a new deal with Brussels and then put that deal to the people in a second referendum, raising the possibility that the government could end up campaigning against its own agreement. Corbyn, for all his skills as a grass-roots campaigner, remains a deeply unpopular figure.

Those dynamics could open the door to the smaller parties. The Liberal Democrats are campaigning on a platform of revoking Brexit altogether. That would seem to appeal to Conservative voters in London and the southeast of England who opposed Brexit, as well as some anti-Brexit Labour voters.

In 2017, the Conservative and Labour parties got 82% of the popular vote and 9 of every 10 Parliamentary seats. Analysts expect those numbers to fall this year, as the fragmentation of British politics accelerates.

It is one of the great ironies of the Brexit odyssey, said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, that “what you’re seeing is the Europeanisation of British party politics. The two-party system is breaking down because of the pressures of Brexit.”

The election is a gamble for Johnson in the most direct way. In his own parliamentary constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, on the outskirts of London, he has a narrow majority of 5,034 votes. A strong showing by a Brexit Party candidate could siphon off enough votes to tip the seat to Labour. Were Johnson to leap to a safer seat as has been rumoured, he would risk looking as if he was running scared.

Johnson knows that his Brexit policy is likely to cost the Conservatives anti-Brexit voters in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party is strong; in London, a Labour stronghold; and in the south of England, where the Liberal Democrats hope to gain. His gamble is that he can more than make up for those losses in the Midlands and the north, and in Wales, all of which voted to leave the European Union in 2016.

But Farage is complicating the strategy by threatening to run candidates across the country unless Johnson agrees to scrap his Brexit deal and pursue what Farage calls a “clean break” from Brussels.

In the 2015 election, Farage argued, the UK Independence Party, which he led before leaving to form the Brexit Party, helped the Conservatives gain power by taking critical votes from Labour. This time, most polling experts believe, the Tories will suffer more because the Brexit Party, by definition, appeals to Brexiteers — the very people who will be courted by Johnson.

A skilled communicator — not unlike his radio show guest, Trump — Farage could doom Johnson’s chances if he can persuade enough pro-Brexit voters that the Tory plan is not enough of a clean break with the European Union or that Johnson is untrustworthy on Brexit.

“Frankly,” Farage said, “there is no point leaving if we accept this approach.”

© 2019 New York Times News Service