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Britain Prime Minister Boris Johnson appears to have won a large, decisive and potentially powerful majority of parliamentary seats in Thursday’s election, according to the exit polls released minutes after the voting ended.
If the exit poll results hold when actual ballots are tallied, Johnson and his Conservative Party will have achieved a smashing success – the largest win for the Tories since the days of Margaret Thatcher -and the opposition Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn will have suffered their worst defeat in four decades.
If the numbers hold through the night, Johnson and the Conservatives will assuredly plow forward with Brexit on steroids.
Dreams of a second referendum – of remaining in the European Union – will be dashed. And by January, one of the dominant partners in the long, lucrative, peaceful, postwar order, manifested by Europe’s political and trade bloc, will go off on its own.
If the voters deny Johnson the outright win he has been pleading for, hobbling him with an enfeebled slim-majority government or, worse for him, a hung Parliament – well, then, things could get very testy, with yet more months or years of paralysis over Brexit to follow.
If Johnson’s archrival, the opposition Labour Party leader, the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn, surprises every one of the pollsters and takes enough votes, he could best the Tories and try to cobble together a coalition to run the country and begin his promised “radical transformation” of the British economy under a socialist banner.
The polls opened Thursday at 7 a.m. in the predawn darkness. The weather forecast was gray, wet and relatively miserable.
Counting has started for UK election results.
This was Britain’s third general election in a little more than four years, and the second since the June 2016 Brexit referendum. According to the surplus of opinion surveys and interviews, people are as hopelessly divided over the EU as they were when they voted 52% to 48%to leave.
While Brexit was dominant in many voters’ minds on Thursday, this was not purely a Brexit election.
Sarah Duncan, 71, historian, is a lifelong Conservative voter. She was up first thing to her London polling station, not far from the River Thames. She said this election “was particularly important, because I’m very frightened of far-left wing government and what Jeremy Corbyn could do for this country.”
Duncan confessed in the June 2016 referendum, “I voted to stay, I didn’t vote for Brexit, but I do feel that because the country has voted for Brexit, it’s a democratic country, and we should do what the majority said and we should leave and that’s what Boris has stands for.” As a leader, she said, “he hasn’t had a chance to prove himself yet. We will wait and see.”
Nick Symes, 53, a yacht broker, standing in the rain, said he voted for the Labour Party because, “it’s socialist, it’s why I like it, it’s redistributive, and it’s not Boris Johnson.”
Josh Hawketts, 27, an underwriter, voted Labour in his constituency in Battersea, southwest London. Standing outside a polling station, just before sunrise, he explained that his vote was “not for Corbyn or anything like that, it was purely tactical. Just anti-Tory, basically.”
He said that he was anti-Tory “primarily because of Brexit, but there are other things, austerity over last nine years, underfunding.”
Voters complained they didn’t like their choices – that the main parties have become too extreme. Brits have watched, too, as traditional courtesies have been flung aside, with members of Parliament hurling charges of treason and surrender at one another in the House of Commons and decrying plots to “undermine democracy.”
Campaigning lawmakers from both parties, but especially women, said they were terrified of being physically attacked while knocking on constituents’ doors.
The anxious and gloomy atmosphere was made worse by the fact that, for the first time in years, Brits were going to the polls in December, when the sun sets at 3:50 p.m.
Johnson has been the pied piper for Brexit since the 2016 referendum, though in the election campaign, he didn’t say much about the reasons for leaving – except to promise that after Brexit, his government will unleash British potential on a global stage.
His dominant message has been “Get Brexit Done.” He wore that slogan on his apron as he made meat pies in front of the cameras. He drove a bulldozer emblazoned with it through a pile of foam blocks.
“Get Brexit Done” is a simple, aspirational message but ultimately misleading – because even if Johnson and his Conservatives win big, Brexit will not be over.
Untangling 45 years of integration with Europe – not only on trade, finance, migration and manufacturing but also on security, intelligence, aviation, fishing, medicine patents and data sharing – will take another year or more of hard-fought negotiations with Europe and will almost certainly dominate headlines and consume the agenda in Westminster.
If Johnson wins, the Conservatives have promised – in capital letters in the party’s manifesto – that he will never, ever ask for another Brexit delay beyond the December 2020 deadline.
This raises the possibility that if Johnson doesn’t secure a quickie trade agreement, he will again threaten to take Britain out of Europe with “no deal,” returning the country to a retread of debates that dominated former prime minister Theresa May’s time in office – until she was booted out by her own party for not getting Brexit done.
In Brussels, EU leaders who had gathered for a previously planned summit were preparing for a late night of election results-watching. Several said they just wanted to get Brexit over with.
Perhaps surprisingly, more than one top diplomat said they were hoping for a robust majority for the eventual victor – and not a hung parliament, as many British remainers want.
“The best thing for Ireland, for the U.K. and for Europe would be an end to the uncertainty. So whether that’s Prime Minister Johnson winning with a large majority or the Remain parties together winning a majority, we will work with whatever the outcome is,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told reporters in Brussels. “What’s been very hard to work with is a Parliament that was a hung Parliament, that wasn’t able to come to a majority decision on anything. I just hope we are not in that position again tomorrow.”
Privately, some diplomats who work on Brexit said that if pro-Brexit Johnson won a sweeping majority, the end result, paradoxically, could be a Britain that winds up more closely aligned with the EU than if he has weak control over Parliament. A big majority, the diplomats reasoned, would give Johnson more flexibility to make compromises during what is likely to be a lightning-fast year of negotiations on a trade deal. If Johnson had only a few votes to spare, he could be more vulnerable to be taken hostage by Brexit hardliners who insist on the sharpest possible split from Europe.
Johnson’s rival Corbyn proposed a softer Brexit – plus the guarantee of a second referendum within six months, another national vote on whether to stay or go, with the option to call the whole thing off.
Labour also hammered away on a theme that the prime minister and his party “just don’t care” about the beloved National Health Service – and the Conservatives were readying to sell it off to the Americans.
While some Brits who really want to remain in the EU might have pivoted to support Corbyn’s promised “do-over” referendum, or a smaller anti-Brexit party, many voters said they were burned out on Brexit and just wanted to see the pain end.
YouGov’s constituency-by-constituency poll predicted Conservatives would win 339 seats, and Labour 231. The Conservative gains were mostly forecast in the “red wall” areas of the north – Brexit-backing, working-class areas that have long been Labour strongholds.
While Brexit dominated the election, the two main party leaders were also dogged by questions about character, particularly their trustworthiness.
“As British elections have become more presidential, the question of the leader is now important,” said Tony Travers, a politics professor at the London School of Economics.
Johnson has a reputation as someone with a loose relationship with the truth. He was fired from his first journalism job for making up a quote. He became a Brussels correspondent known for outrageous and factually questionable dispatches. In the Brexit referendum campaign, he promoted a highly inflated number on how much Britain contributes to the EU.
That reputation may have been reinforced during this election campaign as Johnson evaded questions – on the impact of his Brexit deal on Northern Ireland, on how many hospitals his government would build, on his relationship with American entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri, who accused him of ghosting her like “some fleeting one-night stand.”
On the final day of campaigning, Johnson was reported to have dodged an interview by hiding in a refrigerator.
And then there’s Corbyn, a European-style socialist, who has been mocked for years by Conservative news media as a “red menace.” When Labour released its campaign platform last month, the tabloid Daily Mail labeled it “the Marxist Manifesto.” Corbyn was additionally criticized for refusing to be pinned down on Brexit and for failing to root out anti-Semitism in his party.
It’s notable that many Labour and Conservative candidates made zero mention of their party leaders on their websites and leaflets, presumably because they thought they had a better chance of winning without the association.
Looking back on the campaign, there were several potentially pivotal moments.
The Conservatives got a boost when Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party decided not to contest seats the Tories won in 2017.
And President Donald Trump arguably did the prime minister a favor when he said the United States wouldn’t want Britain’s health system even if it were handed over “on a silver platter.”
But one of the most important moments of the election may have come just before it was called – when Johnson successfully renegotiated a withdrawal deal with EU leaders though he failed to get parliamentary support for his fast-tracked timetable.
Unlike his predecessor, Theresa May, who called an election to strengthen her hand in negotiations with the EU, Johnson can pitch Brexit as something that is nearly done and just needs an extra push over the finish line.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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