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| Exit polls, Dec 12, 2019, 10 pm GMT |
by Andrew Roberts
Dear Boris, Hallelujah! The historian in you will have
been relishing all the dates that we heard on Thursday night, with
constituencies returning Tory MPs that have not done so since 1931, 1922, even
1918.
You have pretty much single-handedly given us the best
result since 1987, another great date in Tory history.
Meanwhile, Labour having had their worst drubbing since
1935, a date that will have a particular resonance for you as a biographer of
Churchill, coming right in the middle of his Wilderness Years.
Yet of course there’s a warning there too, because in the
next election after 1935, Labour won a landslide victory of 393 seats, even
more than you’ve just won.
Another remarkable statistic about your opponents is that
by the time of the next election, Labour will not have won an election in half
a century under anyone not called Tony Blair.
When we leave the EU on January 31, you will have already
become the most consequential prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, what we
historians call a “rain-maker PM”, one of the handful who institute lasting
change, like Clement Attlee and Thatcher herself.
But there is another prize that you will hopefully
already be concentrating your historically conscious mind upon. For no party in
British history has been on the winning side of five general elections in a row
since 1830.
If you were to manage that, you would beat the records of
the Salisbury-Balfour premierships, as well as those of Thatcher-Major and Blair-Brown.
It would be an astonishing achievement, and with your highly competitive
nature, something to aim for.
Do you recall visiting the “Churchill: The Power of
Words” exhibition that I co-curated at the Morgan Library in New York about ten
years ago?
How we couldn’t find a taxi to take us uptown fifty
blocks to a party, and how therefore you and I and the beautiful woman you were
with took a bicycle-taxi up Madison Avenue.
After about ten blocks, when the pedal-cabbie
understandably seemed to be making heavy weather of it, you and he swapped
places and pedaled us the rest of the way, swerving in and out of the traffic
for forty blocks uphill and somewhat nerve-wrackingly.
When he shouted to you that you didn’t have a license,
you called back over your shoulder, “I have the universal license; I’m chairman
of Transport for London!”
Well, today you really do have the universal license to
remake politics and British society, with an election victory that was focused
all around you and your central messages. Dominic Cummings and Isaac Levido
were brilliant hires and did an absolutely superb job, but this is your
victory.
In order to repeat it, and win that fifth term for the
Tories, you are going to have to be extraordinarily bold quite apart from
Brexit, politics and even the economy.
You must fight the battle for British political culture,
a struggle that every British Tory premier has ducked since the fall of
Margaret Thatcher 39 years ago last month.
Why should it be that in huge and vital areas of British
life it is considered a dirty word to be
a Tory? Why are over 85 per cent of university lecturers left-wing? Why is
every BBC show so painfully politically-correct?
Why do the masterships of so many colleges of Academe go
to former Labour cabinet ministers and the ex-editors of Left-supporting
newspapers and media enterprises? Why does the Civil Service only ever leak in
a pro-Remain way?
This, and the Left’s control of so many quangos and arts
organisations, is something that you must now tackle.
If you don’t, and the Left continues in control of all of
the commanding heights of our political culture except for the House of Commons,
they will be able to pour their anti-capitalist bile into the minds of our
youth for another half-decade before the next election.
Already the Left is closing down free speech in our
universities, so complete is their control. The Italian Marxist political
scientist Antonio Gramsci argued that the Left did not have to win election and
after election, but instead only needed to take over all the key institutions
of the state and then indoctrinate the people.
That has been happening to such an extent that no fewer
than one-third of the electorate voted for a pro-IRA, anti-Semitic Marxist to
become prime minister on Thursday.
Of course the British people love democracy – it was why
Jo Swinson lost her seat in East Dunbartonshire because people spotted the
contempt for democracy inherent in her pledge to stop Brexit without even
holding another referendum.
As a Churchill admirer – indeed the author of a Churchill
biography almost as successful
as mine – you will remember his father’s Tory Democrat call: “Trust the
People”. One must trust them, but in the next election you will not have the
inestimable advantages of “Get Brexit Done” as your cry and Jeremy Corbyn as
your opponent.
Therefore you need to institute a Gramscian counter-march
through the institutions, liberating one after the other from the grip of the
Left. The economic and political battles are not the whole struggle.
In five years’ time it should be possible to be a proud
Tory in the BBC, a Scottish University, an NHS Trust, the Channel 4 board, or
even a major trade union, and not feel that you are carrying The Mark of Cain.
For then we might get back to a sensible politics in
which a prime minister of Britain is not held personally responsible for the
wellbeing of every one of the more than one million patients that are served by
the NHS every thirty-six hours, where a film crew can shove a photo of the
front page of The Daily Mirror and expect an immediate display of emoting in
response.
We will instead have a politics where actors like Steve
Coogan and Hugh Grant get on and act, rather than lecturing us on how to vote
against the Conservatives, and where has-been politicians like John Major, Tony
Blair and Michael Heseltine, who had their day in the limelight decades ago, no
longer think we are interested in their bitter, ancient gripes against the
democratic will.
You might even be able to teach Nicola Sturgeon what the
phrase “once in a generation” when applied to the 2014 Scottish referendum
actually meant.
Achieve that kind of change in our political culture, and
Redcar really will stay Bluecar, and you will be well on your way to becoming
World King!
Congratulations again on an extraordinary result.
Fondest regards, Andrew.
Historian Andrew Roberts’s Leadership
in War was published last month.
