Jeremy Corbyn is a chicken. Jeremy Corbyn is frit.
The Conservatives are convinced that the voters want a general election just as much as they do, will be outraged if Corbyn fails to allow one at the earliest opportunity and punish him when an election does come.
I suspect this view is mistaken.
If you ask people for an opinion poll most will say there ought to be an election. But that doesn't mean they have given the idea much thought or care a great deal about it.
Most of them certainly do not care half as much as the Conservatives do.
And when the election campaign starts it will be schools and hospitals that dominate debate. The Conservatives will try to confine discussion to Brexit, but fail in that attempt,
What happened in the run up to the election will be largely forgotten.
On the bus the other day I earwigged one side of a mobile phone conversation between a woman and an opinion polling interviewer. Woman on bus was not inclined to give a simple answer when she had somebody listening to what she felt...
ReplyDeleteShe would vote for the Brexit Party because she had expressed her option at the referendum and had not changed it. She didn't have anything nice to say about Corbyn, Labour, Johnson, Conservatives.
About 10% of the electorate -- ones who vote rather than on the register -- will be hard to shift from the Brexit Party to the Conservatives. There'll be a similar figure for Remainers backing the Lib Dems. I think that the proportion of floating voters Cons <--> Labour is negligible and that Labour will find it difficult to draw any voters away from other parties. The next general election will be determined by Conservative-inclined voters and whether they can stomach or perceive Johnson's cynicism.