I am a habitual, lifelong loser, mollified slightly (but not really) by a few years of feeling ambivalent about victory. At around this time in the cycle, I start to systematically devour my hopes, like Pacman. The polls – never right any more, anyway – are always the wrongest when they surprise you with their leftwardness.
Tories are always shy – or, more accurately, ashamed. Consequently, there are always more of them than you ever dreamed possible. Young people will always be a force to be reckoned with, when they turn out; and then they don’t. Women will always have some definitive impact when they jump in the direction they’re all tending towards; except then, when it comes to it, they don’t all agree.
Audiences on current affairs programmes are like a radical communist salon compared with the general population. Sometimes I forget to rain hard enough, and there’s still a tiny bit of parade going on as the exit polls come out. Then the result lands like a punch in the face. I don’t want to live through 2015 again.
Having performed this catechism, I don’t greet this week’s vote trembling with what-ifs. I haven’t blocked out this coming Friday for emergency socialist champagne. I’m braced for Conservative gloating at its apex, almost any result leveraged for pompous, outlandish claims about what the country overwhelmingly wants.
So the exhilaration, the brand-new-dawn feeling I have about 9 June, has nothing to do with who gets which seats. It is, rather, the sense that everything has changed.
We could never have dared to dream that the Conservative campaign would be so bad. As Theresa May called the election, having said that she wouldn’t, I wasn’t sold on that as a statement of her inconsistency or her lies: very few politicians are explicit about their plans until their plans are upon them; and if they are, we deride them for poor strategy.
But then came her manifesto: so underdeveloped, so patchy, so scattergun, alienating and amateurish. It looked like an election she’d stumbled into in an anxiety dream. Then came the great social care U-turn and the denial of the U-turn, the laughable vacuousness of the few interviews she would actually give, and the peevish avoidance of public debate.
It’s been a feat unrecorded in living political history: the triple U-turn. First she said there would be no election campaign; then she said there would; and it turned out she was right the first time. She had no campaign. She has done something I didn’t think could be done so fast, or so surely, by anybody: ended the Conservatives’ aura of inevitability.
However much one disagreed with them previously, their combination of confidence and coherence was undeniable and often felt unassailable. After this graphic show of ideological emptiness, they appear not as a force but a bunch of wandering street preachers – splenetic and isolated, no hearth to return to.
The Conservatives may have no answers, but they can’t spirit away the questions: what do we want for schools? What if we could afford universal childcare or tertiary education, or both? What should we do about social care and the NHS?
Pre-Brexit, all these questions were easily parried with the word “austerity”. The unarguable language of thrift has, for the past seven years, created a political constipation, where bold thoughts about social purpose can’t be had unless the cost is zero. But in the post-Brexit terrain, no price is too high for the priceless commodity of sovereignty. And this has broken the spell. Health, learning, dignity in old age: maybe they’re all priceless too. If this election had done nothing else, it would have shone a light on that.
Yet it’s done much more: it has revivified Corbyn’s case and his standing. I always had doubts about his competence, his clarity and his ability to compromise, while simultaneously finding the right’s attacks on him, for a lack of patriotism or palling around with terrorists, unintelligent and in bad faith. It’s a dispiriting position to occupy, seeing faults in a person yet abhorring the dimwitted missiles fired at him from the other side (not unlike the experience, this time last year, of supporting the EU).
What this election, with its incessant polling, has shown, is that people aren’t stupid. Front pages can holler at them that Jeremy Corbyn won’t sing the national anthem, and they simply won’t bite. Instead, there has been a progressive resurgence – not just within Labour, with supporters gaining conviction and sympathisers overcoming reservations, but across the left flank, among Greens, Lib Dems and unaffiliated campaigners.
The weakness of the Conservatives has converged with coincidental events – the surprisingly heartening victory of Emmanuel Macron, the destructive potential of Donald Trump – to give both urgent necessity and newfound buoyancy to the progressive project.
And it’s visible everywhere, especially at a local level, in electoral deals forged, non-aggression pacts between major parties, and audacious focus from minuscule parties such as the National Health Action party (standing in South West Surrey) and the Women’s Equality party (standing in Shipley).
And engagement generated by this election – whether it’s in the record number of new voter registrations or the concerted efforts of civic tech entrepreneurs to make democracy more transparent and its details more accessible – is unlikely to evaporate just because the election is over. Thanks in part to the import of US, Bernie Sanders-style organising techniques, in part to the blank obviousness of the dangers of a Tory landslide, there has been a reconnection between activism and actual activity.
As if all that weren’t enough, Momentum – far more complex and subtle an organisation than the Corbyn-loyal attack unit it’s commonly portrayed as being – has managed to make the first genuinely serious yet funny political broadcast I’ve ever seen. This energy will take years of fresh disappointment to dispel.