THE puns are perhaps predictable. “Mayday! Mayday!” and “Mayhem” roared the front page of a couple of papers the morning after the day before.
If I were a headline sub, I would have gone for “Mayday Mayhem” — for that is exactly what the British electorate unleashed on the hapless Conservative British Prime Minister Theresa May in Thursday’s general election, giving her and her Tory Party a bloody nose in the process.
By gambling on a snap election, which was totally unnecessary, May was not only tanked by voters but turned a 12-seat Tory majority in the last Parliament into a seven-seat shortfall from an overall majority in the new 650-seat House of Commons in a hung Parliament.
True, the Tories emerged as the single largest party, winning 319 seats and 42.4 per cent of the vote, way ahead of the Labour Party which got 261 seats and 40 per cent of the vote, but this was a pyrrhic victory. The dejection and disappointment on May’s face as she left the hall in her constituency in the early hours of Friday morning for the Tory Party’s headquarters in Smith Square, just a stone’s throw away from the House of Commons, after comfortably winning her seat in Maidenhead, is in sharp contrast to her strident demeanour when she announced the election date in April and the polls put her 20 percentage points ahead, with the Tories complacently predicting a landslide.
Poor advisers, an ill-thought out manifesto light on substance and her “presidential” style of campaigning, asking voters to believe in her personally to deliver stability and certainty in delivering Brexit are just some of the criticisms surging from other Tories in the inevitable post-mortem.
Democracy can be very brutal. One of the casualties was none other than Ben Gummer, one of the architects of the Tory manifesto, who saw his Ipswich seat go red for the first time in several generations.
May’s near humiliation is further underlined by the fact that she has now been reduced to negotiating a minority government with the help of the 10 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) members of parliament (MPs) in Northern Ireland, without whom she would find it difficult to win a Queen’s Speech, which is the centrepiece of the State Opening of Parliament and a list of the laws that the government hopes to get approved by Parliament over the coming year.
By convention, it is read out by the sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II, in the presence of MPs, peers and other dignitaries in the House of Lords.
Severely weakened, she could hardly afford a wholesale reshuffle antagonising senior colleagues and livid backbenchers, some of whom are baying for her blood and eventual resignation. Not surprisingly, none of the top cabinet posts have changed.
Labour exceeded expectations, taking 40 per cent of the vote and gaining 29 seats for the first time in almost two decades.
A vindicated Jeremy Corbyn is waiting in the wings to try his hand in forming a coalition government should the Tory romancing of the DUP fall foul.
As one politician stressed: “When Northern Irish unionism and Conservative unionism come together, it always ends in betrayal.”
Corbyn to his credit must be commended for inspiring thousands of younger voters who contributed to Labour’s remarkable turnaround, in what was effectively a return to traditional two- party politics and the marginalisation of the Liberal Democrats and the annihilation of the anti-European Union United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip).
North of the border in Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP), bent on a perceived obsession with a second independence referendum, suffered their own setback, losing 21 seats and saw both the Tories and Labour regaining footholds in Scottish constituencies following their effective wipeout two years ago when the Nationalists won 55 out of 56 Westminster seats.
A UK general election would not be complete without its eccentricities in a festival of democracy.
The likes of candidates Lord Sutch from the Monster Raving Looney Party and the self-styled Lord Buckethead are as much part of the furniture of the electoral architecture as the returning officers at a count.
The Labour Party must be applauded for increasing its representation of disabled people with the election of two new MPs, Marsha de Cordova in Battersea who is visually impaired, and Jared O’Mara, the new Sheffield Hallam MP who has cerebral palsy and who ousted Nick Clegg, former LibDem leader and deputy prime minister in the Cameron coalition government.
As Britain, Brussels and the world digest the dramatic result in the UK, it is the economic impact of the poll that could have far-reaching consequences for Brits and for foreign investors, including those in the highly prized luxury London realty sector such as Malaysia’s Sime Darby, KP Setia and Employees Provident Fund, the promoters of the Battersea Power Station development.
It is possible that the uncertainty caused by a possible second EU referendum may have receded, but the weakened position of the Tories, in conjunction with a pro “soft-border” DUP, would suggest that the UK would be on course for a softer Brexit.
This outcome, according to analysts, may be attractive to institutions, considering their position in the City of London and international investors looking at the UK, particularly as global events such as the Trump-Russia affair and continuing destabilisation in the Middle East is causing even greater economic and political flux outside the UK.
Sterling reacted predictably at the news of a possible hung Parliament dipping two per cent in value against the US dollar and euro, settling down between two to three per cent for the day, from an already weak position.
Sterling’s volatility, according to bankers, is likely to continue in the current political situation, which may encourage more active investors to take advantage of discounted prices in the property and stock market.
All this is food for thought for a beleaguered May, who apologised “for all those colleagues who lost their seats” and promised “to reflect on what has happened!”
Mushtak Parker is an independent London-based economist and writer. He can be reached via mushtakparker@yahoo.co.uk