Who would win a general election?

Ordinarily, a reasonably popular new PM would stand a good chance of gaining a majority. But these are no ordinary times, writes Sean O'Grady

Head to head: culture war politics could help Johnson beat Corbyn

Tricky question at the best of times, but more uncertain than ever. Ordinarily, a new prime minister with an eight-point lead in the opinion polls over the main opposition party and looking for their own mandate might feel reasonably confident about taking their case to the country.

Boris Johnson saw a bounce in his party’s position in the opinion polls after he won the leadership, and most of this honeymoon effect seems to have sustained (although recent setbacks might have dented the lead). On a personal level, he scores well on competence and decisiveness, but rather less impressively on honesty and being in touch.

However, these are not ordinary times, as we well know. In the first place, before any other factor can be weighed in the balance, voters tend not to thank politicians who drag them out to the polls again.

This may be particularly true about a late autumn election on, say 14 October or so. The nights are drawing in, and the days will be much shorter when the clocks go back on 27 October. There’s a good reason why British general elections are held in the spring or summer; no one wants to be campaigning in the dark and in the rain. Of course Dominic Cummings might sense some radical Sun Tzu-type tactical brilliance in having polling on Christmas Day, or in refusing to end British Summer Time, but still… Johnson seems keen to shift the responsibility for having an early, unnecessary snap election onto Jeremy Corbyn, but has not been consistent about this. The voters, as ever, will make their own minds up.

Second, an election campaign can end up being about issues quite different to the ones the party leaders might like. In 2017, Theresa May saw her large poll lead evaporate when the electorate decided they don’t want to give her a huge mandate after all. She also ran an unexpectedly poor campaign, while Corbyn was pretty good on the stump. Things can go wrong.

There are other changes too, big ones, since 2017. Labour’s weakness is the most obvious, and does give Johnson the advantage in the majority of marginals, which are, broadly, Lab/Con and in the Midlands, Lancashire and London. Corbyn is a doughty warhorse, but he stars from behind again.

On the other hand, the Liberal Democrats are much stronger than they were in 2017, still then recovering from their coalition toxicity. At 19 per cent, they’re about double where they were last time, and can expect large gains. “Stop Brexit” has given them a clear aim and slogan. They will take a bite out of Conservative support in the southwest and the kind of larger market towns and Home Counties seats where Remain did well in 2016. They are also winning support from Labour voters disillusioned by the party’s stand on Brexit, particularly in university towns and London. So there are lots and lots of crosscurrents and the net effect is very difficult to predict under our first-past-the-post system.

In Scotland, the party system is different again. There is a case for saying, indeed, that British general elections can be won or lost there. Ruth Davidson’s appeal gave the Tories a bonus of 13 seats in 2017 (they had just one previously), which more or less kept May in Downing Street. By contrast Labour’s historically poor showing of seven Scottish MPs deprived Corbyn of the traditional Labour phalanx of dozens coming down on the sleeper to London to make up for their longstanding weakness in England.

Now, with Davidson resigning as Scottish Conservative leader, with disarray over Labour’s plans for a second referendum, and the deep hostility to no-deal Brexit across the nation (which voted Remain in 2016), another SNP surge looks very likely indeed. Labour’s new decline in Wales also threatens to deprive it of some traditional bases of support. The Greens too might take more radical votes from Labour; a pact with the Lib Dems (and/or Plaid Cymru and the SNP), might help maximise Caroline Lucas’s prospects

The other insurgency that will hit the Conservative vote, and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the Labour vote is the intervention of the Brexit Party. Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle is running at about 15 per cent, or more or less where Ukip was in the early part of this decade, and much more than in 2017. Given how evenly spread the Brexit vote tends to be, it might not yield many Brexit MPs, assuming Farage doesn’t go for a “non-aggression pact”, but they might expect a few, setting up a bridgehead into the Commons. More important, the Brexit Party might advance during the campaign with its undiluted, uncompromising no-deal message and tear another chunk out of the Conservative base. The small continuing Ukip vote might make a bit of a difference in some very close contests. It all depends on how effectively the Brexit Party (like the Liberal Democrats) target their best prospects.

In short, you could envisage the Conservatives winning back many of the seats lost to Labour in 2017, simply because the Labour vote has fallen more than the Conservative vote has. If they gained a couple of dozen, though, from Corbyn, Johnson could quite conceivably lose another dozen in the nicer bits of southern and southwest England to Jo Swinson; and a further dozen back to the SNP and other opposition parties in Scotland.

Another complicating factor will be an unpredictable number of “Independent Conservative” candidates, either running on their own ticket (eg Rory Stewart), or under the Independent Group for Change banner, or as Lib Dem defectors. They’d split the Tory vote, maybe to the advantage of the Brexit Party or Labour, and a handful of them might also get in – and make a difference in a tight parliament.

Such is the fundamental electoral geography of the UK – a pure accident of how the system works – that there is an inbuilt “bias” against the Conservatives (as once there was against Labour). This is because Tory votes tend to pile up uselessly in safe seats in the south of England and the suburbs, while Labour’s is more efficiently distributed in those key marginals. This is a very long run phenomenon. When John Major thrashed Neil Kinnock in 1992, he had a winning margin of 7.5 per cent in the popular vote, it left the Tories with fairly modest majority of about 20. When David Cameron managed to get a similar margin over Gordon Brown in 2010, he was rewarded with no majority at all. In 2017, to be fair, Ms May did get a good 800,000 votes, or 2.4 per cent more than Labour, but of course was doomed to minority government. In the 1950s she would have had a decent majority.

Thus, even if everything was going well for Johnson on Brexit, on the economy and on schools ad hospitals, and even with a weak Labour Party, he would be unwise to assume victory. His best prospect might lie in abandoning the traditional party political approach, and instead running a negative culture war election, polarising the choice around himself and Corbyn, and pioneering social media and their novel channels. Maybe Johnson would be able to assemble a Conservative-DUP-Brexit Party Leave alliance.

Still, Johnson would be very lucky indeed to get any kind of majority, and one that would last a full five years seems still more unrealistic. We might, quite easily, be back to square one and another hung parliament. Again. He should, one way or another, be better off announcing a barnstorming second EU referendum, which actually he’d be much more suited for (as would his advisers Cummings and Lynton Crosby), and thus likely to win. After all, he did it before.