We will all soon forget Chesham and Amersham
That is not something to celebrate
It is a poorly understood tenet of modern politics that its greatest currency is success. This might seem obvious: which politician doesn’t seek success, in one form or another, and which observer of politics fails to recognise the successful? We rarely look at this tenet in any depth, however, nor question how it shapes our perceptions of parties, leaders and policies, regardless of their underlying qualities. Again and again we allow our debate to be guided more by near-term fortune than by that which we should actually want to understand.
The recent Chesham and Amersham by-election reminds me of this dilemma. In the dominant narrative, Boris Johnson has taken a heavy blow: no longer lord of all he surveys but fatally undermined by southern voters punishing him for ignoring them. It is worth highlighting this now. In just over a week, we will be subjected to another by-election, this time in Batley and Spen, once a relatively safe Labour seat. With the Tories on-course for a win, expect the conversation to move back to Labour’s travails and Keir Starmer’s perceived weaknesses, just as it did after the Hartlepool poll on 6 May.
Chesham and Amersham may yet herald a seismic shift, if in time. The Tories electoral plan in 2019 was effectively a reversal of Blair’s famous ‘southern strategy’: an appeal to middle-class southerners, knowing Labour’s historical northern support had nowhere else to go. Of course, we are living with the long-term effects of that decision — the cross-generational loyalty of many northern communities to Labour now completely severed. We may see the same happen to the Conservatives. 2019 was, however, 14 years after Blair won his last majority: an eternity in politics. One by-election loss, even disappointing local election results in the south, does not necessarily indicate dramatic and immediate change.
We have been here before. Earlier this year, when the narrative focused on Johnson’s callous comments on Covid-19 deaths and his solicitation of donations to pay for renovations to his Downing Street flat, he seemed weak, vulnerable. A few days later, he was riding high on victories in the English local elections, his troubles forgotten. It is not just the effect of success itself here in writing a narrative, but the way it colours our perceptions of the essential qualities of leaders and parties. Every political value has its mirror. Starmer, once touted as grown-up and ‘forensic’ in his early tangles with Johnson, when he was climbing in the polls, is now ‘boring’ and lacks vision (though, of course, some pointed that out at the time).
None of these essential qualities have really changed. Boris Johnson is still spendthrift and careless. Keir Starmer still wooden and lawyerly. Neither have the facts really changed. Johnson is still under investigation for the donations; Starmer still routinely routes him at Prime Minister’s Questions. It’s not necessarily that we have suddenly seen the benefits of such qualities, but that their merits and demerits have always been apparent, and success serves only to obfuscate — for a time — the latter. Fortunes could still turn again. Though the narrative may have moved on, these demerits still deeply trouble those involved. Johnson even plans to strip the Electoral Commission of its prosecutorial powers, in a bid to shutter the investigation against him.
It might be easy to attribute this frequent whiplash to myopic media narratives, focusing on the sound and fury of the present moment at the expense of its motivating forces, and without any self-awareness of what drives different narratives. This is important, certainly, but an oversimplification. That the fortunes of our leaders and parties can turn with such celerity is symptomatic of very human qualities. We like a winner. We like even more to neatly encapsulate people and events in lucid stories. As Johnson knows himself, we ‘live by narrative.’ Even for those most engaged in politics, it is difficult to look beyond the current moment, particularly when no-one else seems to be. For those who want to make the most of the narrative, the skill lies in knowing with utter clarity what essential qualities work — that which people value and which are popular — and cushioning poor fortune. ‘The art of being a successful leader’, as Harold Wilson said, ‘is to turn angles into curves.’
