The pollsters only got it partly wrong this time, though the most spectacular prediction cock-up was that on what would happen to British Labour prior to the exit polls. Scotland crept up with a Tory surge, netting 12 seats, and there were scattering and skirmishing victories over the Scottish National Party, which suffered a considerable bruising.
But what mattered here was a return to the two-tiered showdown, the battlefront which saw Labour mount a challenge that recovered electoral ground almost to the tune of 10 percent from the last vote in 2015. At the end of this bloody carnival, the only one left tall and standing was Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn’s gains, constituting the greatest vote share for Labour since Attlee in 1945, stimulated a movement to harry what must be regarded as a crippled Tory government in need of friends. While the Conservatives were the ultimate victors, it was so utterly Pyrrhic as to warrant reconsideration of their leadership choices.
After all, such electoral bloodshed had been entirely unnecessary for Theresa May, who ran what has been termed, even by some conservatives, the worst election campaign in living memory. “The decision to call an election,” wrote a smug Rod Liddle, who had been on the money from the start, “was arrogant and complacent – and so was the subsequent campaign.”
Having fallen short of a majority by eight seats, May has had to court the Democratic Unionist Party with their 10 seats. Overnight,…