The result of the British election should produce seismic change in Australian politics. But it almost certainly won’t.
The pundits are now shaking their heads and dolefully agreeing that Theresa May ran a terrible campaign. But, until recently, those same pundits were awed by May's strategic nous, agreeing that, by going to the polls early, the Conservatives had cunningly exploited Labor's disarray.
The National Review's Michael Brendan Dougherty declared the Tory party 'an electoral juggernaut with revolutionary potential', marvelling at how its leader was 'outfoxing her opponents on all sides and gaining in popularity', while the Guardian's Matthew D'Ancona lauded May's manifesto as reflecting 'an intelligence, ambition and opposition to populist simplicity'.
May's campaign wasn't terrible. It became terrible because of Corbyn. By canvassing at the grassroots, where he attracted bigger crowds than any prime minister since Churchill, Corbyn made May's deliberate presidential aloofness look arrogant and then cowardly and, eventually (when she sent home secretary Amber Rudd to debate in her place), downright bizarre.
More importantly, Labour's old-fashioned social democratic manifesto wrongfooted both the Tories and the media. Suddenly, the paucity of May's program became evident. What did the Conservatives stand for? They were for fox hunting, they were for defeating the IRA, they were for pre-emptive nuclear strikes — and that was about it.
According to the conventional wisdom, the terrorist attacks in the final weeks of the campaign should have derailed Corbyn as comprehensively as 9/11 and the Tampa crisis shattered Kim Beazley in 2001. Again, though, Corbyn flipped the script.
By raising the hitherto unthinkable suggestion that the War on Terror might be failing, he reframed the national security debate until the Conservatives were on the defensive about their unswerving support for the Saudi autocrats. Corbyn managed all of this despite an unrelentingly hostile media.
"Corbyn appealed to the young and the disengaged not by being sincere or frugal but through his program: breaking with the austerity consensus, targeting the rich, and promising to transform the lives of ordinary people. Politics, in other words, not values."
A study by academics at the London School of Economics showed that an astonishing 75 per cent of news articles in the first months after Corbyn became leader misrepresented him. On election eve, the Daily Mail devoted no less than 13 pages to denouncing Corbyn as an apologist for terror, the culmination of a relentless smear campaign that saw him almost perennially in the redtops as a communist, an Islamist and a