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Janet Albrechtsen

12 festive Brexit lessons from Boris Johnson’s 2019 UK Election victory

Janet Albrechtsen
‘Authenticity and spontaneity are solid gold in the beige, bland, controlled world of politics’. Picture: Andrew Parsons/i-Images
‘Authenticity and spontaneity are solid gold in the beige, bland, controlled world of politics’. Picture: Andrew Parsons/i-Images
5 min read
12:00AMDecember 18, 2019.
Updated 4:23PMDecember 18, 2019

On the 12th day before Christmas, the British election threw up at least a dozen lessons for the political, media and artsy classes to contemplate, or not, over the Australian summer.

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Lesson No 1.

Before ingesting the serious lessons, take time to enjoy the win. The morning after is (almost) better than the day of an election win. It’s when the wrist-slashing and the bloodletting, the sudden remorse from some, and the demented delusion from many more are in full swing.

Between conniptions The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee wrote that “we Cassandras have wrung our hands and howled out loud warning of rising poverty, homelessness, collapsing legal and social care systems, living standards in reverse. Yet the people voted for all this woe.”

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Lesson No 2.

Yes means yes. Too many Remoaners seem to think that voting at an election attracts the same threshold rules that kids are taught in sex ed classes at school. Apparently, a quiet yes is not enough to consent to sex these days. It must be hollering enthusiastic consent, an insistent yes, yes, yes, for it to count.

It should finally count as fervent consent that, on a dark, cold, rainy December day last week, British voters said yes to Brexit a third time. Unless you are a Remoaner who thinks the only ­People’s Vote that matters is the one that goes their way.

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Lesson No 3.

Listen to voters outside your social circle rather than making assertions that betray your echo chamber.

After Boris Johnson’s “stonking” big win, turning a red wall of traditional Labour seats into a blue wave to secure the biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher in 1987, The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher announced on ABC’s The Drum program that “Brexit is not favoured by the ­majority of the British public at the moment”. The exhaust fumes of Hartcher’s echo chamber must border on the illegal, they are so strong.

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Lesson No 4.

There is no substitute for intellectual honesty. Contrast Hartcher’s post-election fantasy with former conservative MP and Times columnist Matthew Parris, a fierce critic of Johnson, who said the election result “has been a very good lesson to me in listening to what you hear, rather than what you want to hear”.

Parris said that everywhere he went before the election, he heard people saying “get Brexit done”, but still he failed to consider the consequence of what he was ­hearing.

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Lesson No 5.

Mocking democracy can’t be camouflaged by calling yourself a Liberal Democrat. The country’s most rancid anti-democrat, Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson, pledged to stop Brexit without a second referendum. She went from saying she could be the UK’s next prime minister to looking frankly weird and clueless in an interview when asked what a woman is. Maybe it had something to do with the £100,000 ($190,000) ­donation the Lib Dems received from a company that manufactures puberty-blocking drugs.

In the end, there weren’t enough woke votes to save her party from suffering its second worst performance in the party’s 31-year modern history. A related lesson: when you lose your own seat, prepare for people dancing a little jig to the tune of democracy, with cameras rolling in the case of Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon.

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Lesson No 6.

Don’t blame the “popular” press for losing an election. On election night, Jeremy Corbyn offered no mea culpa, only a ridiculous dig at the media. Man up, Mr Corbyn. The popular press is popular for a reason. They understand punters better than a bunch of Guardian editorial writers who thought that a socialist and anti-Semite Labour leader deserved to be PM.

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Lesson No 7.

Only the very rich can afford socialism. They will continue to enjoy good food, the best medical care, fine schools and, importantly, the ability to flee a basket-case economy when it gets really bad even for them. And only Corbyn’s young Care Bear communists (credit to James Delingpole) in Momentum think that a vast array of “free” goods and services are really free.

Most mainstream voters are aspirational, neither envious nor hateful class-war warriors.

They know that nationalising anything that moves, seizing shares from public companies, taxing the rich, punishing public schools and proposing a four-day week would usher in economic, and social, disaster.

So, before proposing a workers’ revolution, check first whether the workers are behind you, and not holding raised cricket bats in mid-December.

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Lesson No 8.

A left-wing government will be taken seriously only when it embraces sensible economic policies. Think the Hawke-Keating government. As historian Andrew Roberts observed at the weekend: “By the time of the next election, (UK) ­Labour will not have won an election in half a century under anyone not called Tony Blair.” Yet Corbyn, starting “his period of reflection”, wrote a piece in The Guardian (where else?) on Sunday headlined “We won the argument, but I regret we didn’t convert that into a majority for change”. Suffering the biggest loss since 1935 is the definition of losing the argument.

Corbynism should be dead, buried and cremated after Friday if Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield is ever to return to Labour.

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Lesson No 9.

Most people — outside of public broadcasters, the public service, universities, artsy types and dishonestly labelled “progressive” political parties — don’t go about their day measuring people and issues according to class, race, gender, sexuality, religion. It’s simply not how normal people talk or think.

In the same way, shallow virtue signalling is about as welcome among mainstream voters as dancing is in a Southern Baptist church. Regular voters care about real stuff such as defending national democratic institutions over illiberal multilateral ones, national sovereignty over European rule, controlling immigration rather than open slather borders, and so on.

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Lesson No 10.

Conservative parties in Australia should stop spending so much time and money trying to win seats such as Wentworth and Higgins — they will eventually lose them. Concentrate on keeping Longman and Lindsay instead, and a swathe of other lower to middle-class seats.

Take comfort from the Tories winning the seat of Bassetlaw, a former mining region in the Midlands held by Labour since 1935, securing an 18 per cent swing to win 55 per cent of the vote. Maybe voters did lend Johnson their votes. But it makes more sense to try to extend the loan period than trying to win over inner-city woke warriors.

In Australia, that means letting Labor and the Greens battle for votes from urban elites who want to simultaneously change the climate and lead a workers’ revolution.

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Lesson No 11.

This is the luvvie lesson. When asked on Channel 4 (where else?) who his alter ego Alan Partridge would have voted for, frantic Remoaner and actor Steve Coogan said: “Well, Alan Partridge is ill-informed and ignorant, and therefore he’s a Conservative and a Brexiteer.”

For good measure, Coogan added: “I think the reason the Tories don’t invest as much money in education is because they depend on a certain level of ignorance for their support.” Please keep up your Deplorables routine, Steve.

And if he’s a friend, encourage Remoaner author Ian McEwan to write a sequel to his novella, The Cockroach. It was a nasty book ridiculing Johnson and painting people who voted for Brexit as deranged. Mocking working-class people will cement their faith in conservative parties as their political defenders.

Actors Steve Coogan (left) and Hugh Grant were both vocal in their opposition to Boris Johnson ahead of the UK Election. Pictures: File
Actors Steve Coogan (left) and Hugh Grant were both vocal in their opposition to Boris Johnson ahead of the UK Election. Pictures: File

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Lesson No 12.

THAT photo (at the top of this article) of a ruffled, messy, joyous Johnson jumping up, fists clenched, at his party’s tremendous victory is a reminder of two things: authenticity and spontaneity are solid gold in the beige, bland, controlled world of politics. And, for political ­genius, don’t underestimate Johnson again, either. But more on that next year.

Boris Johnson gets back to work. Picture: Getty Images
Boris Johnson gets back to work. Picture: Getty Images

Merry Christmas.

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Janet Albrechtsen
Janet AlbrechtsenColumnist

Janet Albrechtsen is an opinion columnist with The Australian. She has worked as a solicitor in commercial law, and attained a Doctorate of Juridical Studies from the University of Sydney. She has written for numerous other publications including the Australian Financial Review, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sunday Age, and The Wall Street Journal.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/12-festive-lessons-for-the-political-media-and-artsy-classes/news-story/dc26f3e2d8582ad35e9a9fa6fdb85c17