Oh Snap, Theresa!

In the Autopsy to the 2017 Snap General Election, everyone in the Tory camp is going to be asking themselves, what went wrong? Leaving aside the car crash that was the Tory manifesto, please allow me to offer up my (adjusted for inflation) 50p’s worth.

The Tories believed their own propaganda.

They thought the had the measure of the British people, they thought they controlled the information flow. They believed they actually were 20 points ahead. They weren’t.

It only seemed like it, because their opinion polls were set up to ignore all the people who, actually in the end, caused their downfall - ‘never before’ voters and young people.

Because in their paradigm, these people can be ignored, because they don’t participate in the process, it didn’t occur to the Tories that by ignoring them, they eventually guarantee that they will get involved.

If people get left behind long enough, they start looking for their own path.

And, well, there’s no way to sugar-coat it…

Theresa was a bit of a disaster, wasn’t she?

Tory female politicians are not born, they’re made and to get to the top of such a braying, pompous and arrogant boys club, you must be twice as good and twice as tough, otherwise you’re just a girl and ‘girls aren’t allowed’.

So is it any wonder Theresa couldn’t display any human emotion? Too many years of Tory politicking had conditioned her against such displays.

People are saying Lynton Crosby did a bad job. I say he did an amazing job, why? Because Theresa May is still in No 10, that’s why! Even if she’s barely hanging on by her fingertips, possession is nine tenths of the law and all that.

That is a remarkable achievement.

He did the absolute best with what he had.

She is an excellent script-reading public speaker

(thanks btw to an excellent education system, that her mates managed to dismantle and destroy, but don’t get me started on this…)

She is excellent at remembering her lines and, as long as she keeps any spontaneous interaction to a minimum and avoids real scrutiny, she is able to effectively pass as a competent leader.

So Lynton did what he had to do. He gave her the script, told her not to deviate from it. He kept her closeted away, surrounded by acolytes, kept the press at arm’s length, refused debates, kept her head down and hoped they made it to the finish line before she was found out.

So, actually, he did well.

The biggest problem he had was that the candidate truly believed she was strong and stable at the beginning and so, when spontaneous interaction occurred, she was truly shaken, because that’s when she realised, she had no script for that…and that’s when the wheels started to come off.

Thank goodness they only needed to keep it up for 7 weeks, if it was a normal election cycle they would have been toast. The conservatives might have even been decimated into 3rd place.

So maybe the ‘snap’ nature of this election was the thing that saved her,

So *snaps* to you Theresa…

but not for long…

For more by this author visit Amanda Murphy's blog