Abstract
There was not supposed to be a general election in 2017. In May 2015, David Cameron had formed the first Conservative majority government for 23 years, having won what he called ‘the sweetest victory of all’. Committed to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, his plan was to negotiate a reformed relationship with the EU, which he would then put before the country, where a campaign focusing heavily on the economic risks of leaving the EU would secure a relatively easy victory. The Conservatives would then govern for the rest of the Parliament, before he handed over to his successor, widely assumed to be the Chancellor, George Osborne. Instead, at 7 am on 24 June 2016 and with Britain having voted by 52% to 48% to leave the EU, Cameron remarked dryly to his advisors: ‘Well, that didn’t go according to plan.’ In his first party conference speech as leader back in 2006, he had said he wanted the Conservatives to stop ‘banging on’ about Europe, ‘while parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life’. There was therefore an irony in a referendum over Europe resulting in him announcing his resignation as Prime Minister at 8.23 am, when many parents were getting their kids to school. The third successive Conservative Prime Minister to have been fatally damaged by his party’s European divide, he had been Prime Minister of a majority Conservative administration for just over a year.
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Notes
- 1.
Craig Oliver, Unleashing Demons. Hodder & Stoughton, 2016, p. 367.
- 2.
His 2013 speech proposing a referendum on the EU was also given at exactly the same time as other people would have been taking their children to school.
- 3.
In particular, there was resistance to the idea from some newly elected Conservative MPs, who had not yet had the chance to establish themselves in their constituencies—especially those who had taken seats from Liberal Democrats, those in Wales or those in London. It turned out that many were right to be concerned.
- 4.
Tim Ross and Tom McTague, Betting the House. Biteback, 2017, pp. 87–88.
- 5.
Hammond was also said to be concerned about the state of the economy, with the possibility of both consumer and business confidence declining. See Francis Elliot, ‘Poll to Clear the Air Has Added to the Fog’, in The Times Guide to the House of Commons 2017. Times Books, 2017, p. 9.
- 6.
See William Hague, ‘The Case for an Early General Election: Theresa May Should be Free to Put Her Brexit Plans to the People’, Daily Telegraph, 6 March 2017. Speculation that this article had been encouraged by Number 10 as an exercise in kite-flying, testing how the idea of an early election was received, is denied by those close to May.
- 7.
George Eaton, ‘Exclusive: Conservative Poll Showed Party Would “Lose Seats” to the Liberal Democrats’, New Statesman, 5 April 2017, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/04/exclusive-conservative-poll-showed-party-would-lose-seats-liberal-democrats.
- 8.
The polling was somewhat more nuanced than this, as discussed below (p. 61).
- 9.
Abbie Wightwick, ‘Theresa May on Her Love of Walking in Snowdonia, Reviving the Tory Vote in Wales and Why She Can’t Eat Welsh Cakes’, Wales Online, 19 March 2017, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/theresa-love-walking-snowdonia-reviving-12760499.
- 10.
See Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley, The British General Election of 2010. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, Chapter 1.
- 11.
There is a claim that although he did not dissent in the meeting, the Foreign Secretary had privately tried to persuade the Prime Minister to change her mind, which resulted in the start of the Cabinet meeting being delayed (Tim Shipman, Fall Out. William Collins, 2017, p. 194). This account is disputed.
- 12.
However, as discussed in Chapter 8, there were very good arguments for putting forward a more substantial manifesto.
- 13.
For this claim, see ‘Revealed: How Theresa May’s Two Aides Seized Control of the Tory Election Campaign to Calamitous Effect’, Evening Standard, 16 June 2017.
- 14.
This was, at least in part, informed by some of the polling CTF had undertaken, which revealed that only two Conservative front-rank politicians polled well—May and the Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson. As one of those involved noted: ‘everyone else had terrible numbers, even Boris (which surprised me for a CTF poll…)’.
- 15.
Michael Deacon, ‘Vote Tory, or Brexit is at Risk: Theresa May’s Startling Warning to Voters’, Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2017.
- 16.
In addition, some of May’s aides felt that using Brexit as a justification for the election was counterproductive. As one said: ‘The simple fact is that if you ask people if they think there should be an election, they will say no … No one likes elections. But it still doesn’t follow that you then have to spend ages justifying why you have called it.’ He continued: ‘we concocted a false reason—the need for stability and to “strengthen my hand” in the negotiations—which everyone knew to be complete disingenuous nonsense, and which meant we just talked about Brexit for seven weeks’.
- 17.
HC Debs, 19 April 2017, cc. 681–712.
- 18.
Given the rules required a two-thirds majority of the whole House, rather merely than of those voting, the SNP abstention de facto had the same effect as voting against the motion; it was also noticeable that of the handful of MPs to vote against, two were former SNP MPs, now sitting as independents.
- 19.
The Conservative approach had one further apparent advantage: assuming that the legislation could be passed in time, it still allowed for an election on 8 June. Had the government gone down the route of voting no confidence in itself, the two-week delay required by section 2(3) of the Fixed term-Parliaments Act would have delayed the date of the election beyond that scheduled.
- 20.
This, moreover, is without allowing any time for the wash-up of legislation. The claim made by some of May’s team that she should have called the election on the day that Article 50 was triggered and then hold the election simultaneously with the local elections would only have been possible if Article 50 had been triggered on a different day, as there were insufficient working days between the two events.
- 21.
There is also a claim in Mark Wallace’s excellent account of the Conservative campaign (‘Our CCHQ Election Audit: The Rusty Machine, Part One. Why the Operation That Succeeded in 2015 Failed in 2017’, ConservativeHome, 5 September 2017, https://www.conservativehome.com/majority_conservatism/2017/09/our-cchq-election-audit-the-rusty-machine-part-one-why-the-operation-that-succeeded-in-2015-failed-in-2017.html) that the delay was partly due to advice from Sue Gray, the Cabinet Office’s Director General of Propriety and Ethics, that under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, an election should last seven weeks ‘at minimum’. It is not clear on what basis such a claim would be made, and one senior member of May’s team has denied to us that any such advice was given.
- 22.
Using data from the Polling Observatory team (Rob Ford, William Jennings, Mark Pickup and Christopher Wlezien), Figure 1.1 shows the pooled estimates of every poll from the beginning of the Parliament until the election was called. This method controls for companies’ varying methodologies (‘house effects’). The methodology employed is explained Mark Pickup and Richard Johnston. ‘Campaign Trial Heats as Election Forecasts: Measurement Error and Bias in 2004 Presidential Campaign Polls’, International Journal of Forecasting, 24(2) (2008): 270–82.
- 23.
As one of her aides later remarked, ‘That did mean we had to carefully control the narrative so that people didn’t get carried away—and I accept that that was something we utterly failed to do. From day one, all the talk was of a landslide—which was never our expectation nor motivation’.
- 24.
See also the comments reported in Ross and McTague, Betting the House, p. 93.
- 25.
See also the comments of focus groups reported in Lord Ashcroft’s The Lost Majority. Biteback, 2017, p. 18.
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Cowley, P., Kavanagh, D. (2018). Not Going According to Plan. In: The British General Election of 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95936-8_1
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