Is change in the air for Boris Johnson and his government?
Jamie's Journal by Jamie Stone
My late father was always interesting on the subject of the 1945 General Election. At the time he was a soldier with the 14th Army (the Forgotten Army) fighting the Japanese in Burma, and what he told me was this.
During the years that Winston Churchill was in Number 10, 1940-1945, and while there was a war on, his position in the country was virtually impregnable.
His bulldog spirit was perfect for the struggle to defeat the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. The whole country knew this and that was why Churchill was so strong.
But come the surrender of Germany in May 1945 (and the earlier surrender of Italy, and the inevitability of Japan’s defeat) there was a mood change in the minds of the electorate, all the way from those serving overseas to people at home in the UK.
Times had changed, and there was a general acceptance that a time of peace was ahead and that the national priorities had changed to some of the big issues that are still with us today – employment, health, housing, and the need for national reconstruction.
It was for this reason that I am almost certain that my father, formerly a Tory voter, switched his vote to Labour. He wanted Clement Atlee, who was shortly to oust Churchill as Prime Minister, to be given a clean slate and a real chance to tackle the national imperatives that I list above.
Fast forward to today. My party pulled off an astonishing by-election victory recently in the leafy Chiltern hills of Buckinghamshire, and wrestled a previously entirely safe Tory seat from Boris’s government’s grasp, and turned it Liberal yellow by an astonishing 8000-vote margin.
A one-off, political pundits said, just an aberration – and the right-wing commentator Rod Liddle predicted that the Tories would return to glory days in the subsequent Batley and Spen by-election, which took place a few weeks ago.
“I would stake my life on Labour losing in Batley,” said Mr Liddle, who even went further to predict that Labour would come third.
Well, well. After the election was over, it was clear that Liddle had staked far too much on the result. Labour held the seat – and I wish to goodness that I had had the foresight to have put a bet on that election, and indeed the previous one that I mention.
My point here is simple. I canvassed in both by-elections, and what I heard on the doorsteps increasingly reminded me of what my father told me about the 1945 election.
“Get Brexit done.” That was Boris’s mantra for long enough – that and taking the credit for all the vaccinations. Thus far, these slogans have served him and the government well.
But that was then and this is now, and I do believe that there is a change in the air which could well mean that, hitherto unrecognised by political commentators, politics is in the business of once again changing in the United Kingdom, just as it did in 1945.
Increasingly, the issues that constituents are flagging up with me are a return to what was utmost on the agenda pre-Covid. Employment, health, investment in infrastructure – jobs in the far north, far better access to services in the far north, and the desperate need for real investment in our roads, transport services and airports.
It all rather rings a bell, doesn’t it? I await the next by-election with the very greatest of interest.
- Jamie Stone is the Liberal Democrat MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross.