The problem with analysing electoral trends is that sometimes it’s the grand sweep of history, and other times it’s specific circumstances that get quickly forgotten.
Maybe the Brexiters wouldn’t have won the referendum if they’d hadn’t put Turkey front and centre of the campaign - but Turkey has now been entirely erased from our collective memory of that event.
Maybe Corbyn would have done just as well in 2017 if May hadn’t led such a dire campaign and catastrophically botched her social care plans - but that, too, frequently gets excluded from the narrative.
The point is this stuff is hard. Yes, it’s deindustrialisation and the rise of nationalism, but it’s also who the leader was and what led the bulletins. Narratives, like luck, can change.

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More from @jonlis1

22 Feb
Johnson starts on a foolish note, promising an ‘irreversible’ route out of lockdown. It’s something he simply cannot know.
All the evidence shows schools are safe’. All the evidence does not show this. If it did, scientists would be in unanimous agreement. Why not, for once, just be honest and admit it’s a risk and some experts disagree with it?
Unnecessary cheap shot there, saying some people would like to ‘stay in the slow lane’. Some people just want to stay safe.
Read 5 tweets
31 Dec 20
How many people are prepared to admit that New Year’s Eve is their worst night of the year and that they are genuinely excited to be spending it at home alone
NYE is terrible. One year I had a standup row on the stroke of midnight. Another year (30) I had to supervise a party my flatmate (22) had thrown without telling me. Then there was the year I woke up at 5.30am in someone’s flat, having passed out at 11.50 in a different flat.
Mostly it’s just a terrible anticlimax punctuated by too much alcohol and a rendition of Auld Lang Syne where no-one knows the words.
Read 4 tweets
25 Dec 20
Happy Christmas
Slightly less happy Christmas
Don’t any of you say a fucking word
Read 4 tweets
24 Dec 20
Von der Leyen starts speaking French and the British political establishment grinds to a standstill
Ooh, she’s returned to English and delivered this particular zinger: ‘we need to consider what sovereignty actually means in the 21st century: pulling each other up’. Fucking touché, as I think they say in French
You just know she’s speaking for us better than our own prime minister ever could
Read 5 tweets
19 Dec 20
70% more transmissible?! Happy fucking Christmas
He just couldn’t resist a nationalist flourish boasting about how the UK is best placed in the world to identify new viruses. He simply can’t abandon the jingoism for a moment
Does anyone know the lyrics to ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’
Read 5 tweets
15 Dec 20
The Christmas row highlights a key problem that we have never really discussed: what should be firm guidance and what should be law.
The government relaxed the rules around Christmas because it knew people would break them and it didn’t want to criminalise vast swathes of the population - partly because (you presume) it would embolden people to break more rules, more often, afterwards.
But this is exactly what it’s been doing since the start of the pandemic: criminalising people for gathering in gardens, criminalising them for having sex, criminalising them for chatting to another group in a park.
Read 7 tweets

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