What I expect from this pointless election

A general election is called and in a matter of hours a neutral and unbiased BBC presenter has likened our Prime Minister to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Governments rise and governments fall, but some things stay just as they always were. It was Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM programme who made the comparison, while interviewing the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. In fairness to Mair, he had been alluding to Theresa May’s apparent wish to create ‘unity’ within Westminster, a truly stupid statement within an address which sometimes made no semantic sense and sounded, to my ears, petulant and arrogant. Then along came the opinion pollsters to tell us exactly what will happen on 8 June — except they declined to be too explicit. Having miscalled Brexit, Trump and Cameron’s victory in 2015, this time they restrained themselves to pointing out that Theresa May has a large lead in the polls, but that polls can ‘sometimes be wrong’.

It was at this moment that I suddenly decided that this snap election was going to be rather good fun, on account of the number of people it might confound. It may be that Theresa May has wonderful personal ratings and her party is miles ahead of the inept and fractious rabble which currently goes under the name Labour, but this may be an election for the counter-intuitive among us. Unexpected things are likely to happen.

The first is that the Tories will lose a sackful of seats. It may well be that they end up capturing one or two more than they lose, but lose seats they certainly will. There are 26 Conservative seats in Greater London and they are not all in the taxi-driver belt or the stockbroker belt. If this election really is about Brexit and public unanimity on the issue, which is what May seemed to be suggesting, they have about as much hope of retaining Battersea and Hendon (and many others besides) as I do of mounting Michael Heseltine and winning the Grand National.