No single party securing the necessary majority of 326 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons is not an unprecedented outcome in U.K. politics: it happened, for instance, in 2010 and in 1974. Yet the spectacle of non-majority party leaders seeking to meet the Queen the morning after in a bid to somehow cobble together a standing coalition government elicited sarcasm. Indeed, it is a winding path laden with avoidable pitfalls that has brought the U.K. to this crossroads. When Prime Minister Theresa May announced in April that she was calling snap elections in less than two months, little did she imagine that her sky-high favourability ratings and hopes for a thumping mandate for a hard Brexit would rapidly fizzle out. The Conservative Party leadership may have blundered in confusing the narrow win for the Leave campaign with a sense of public faith in the “strong and stable leadership” that Ms. May promised, not realising that the underlying voter intentions driving the two may be entirely distinct, even contradictory. Faith in a national leadership is driven by a broad swathe of domestic policy promises and outcomes, and unfortunately for the Tories voters assessed them as coming up short. The push for Brexit was, however, powered by a more limited desire for economic distance from the European Union, which voters may have believed another leader could deliver.
The “other leader” of the moment, of course, is Labour Party chief Jeremy Corbyn, who masterfully channelled his long experience of engaging freely with the public to underscore a subtle contrast in leadership style compared to Ms. May, considered to be aloof and surrounded by a small circle of advisers to the exclusion of many even from among her own party. Similarly, the government’s “dementia tax” goof, plans to cut 20,000 police officers at a time when the country was vulnerable to the terror attacks of the sort witnessed in recent weeks, and talk of ending universal free school lunches contrasted embarrassingly with Labour’s manifesto. Yet, it would be unwise to view the result as a victory of any sort for Labour. Ms. May’s government could cling on with the support, from the inside or outside, of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which won 10 seats. In one sense the British people have dealt themselves a difficult hand politically, for they now have to live with the prospect of continuing uncertainty on the direction that their country will take with regard to Brexit and also other domestic concerns. The silver lining may be that by exercising their democratic rights they have given voice to their collective political opinions; and whoever helms their nation would do well to understand all the nuances of their choice.
