‘Science,’ wrote Jules Verne, ‘is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’ Perhaps this is why politics, which claims to be a science, is so littered with tremendous errors at the moment.
It wasn’t just the pollsters and the pundits in Westminster who called this election wrong. People embedded in constituencies couldn’t even correctly predict their own results. These days, politics seems a lot more like alchemy than a real science.
On the night before polling day, a group of Labour MPs compared notes about how things were looking in their patches. It was a miserable conversation in which many were resigned to being dumped by their electorates. Everyone outside a particular metro-politan multi–ethnic bubble reported a hatred of Jeremy Corbyn on the doorstep; hatred of an intensity none of them had seen before. The next day, things still looked bleak. Campaigners knocking on doors in seats such as Wirral South found voters who had once committed to Labour turn around and say they were now off to back the Tories. Meanwhile, Tory MPs with relatively strong majorities were telling one another that their vote was holding up and they couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over so they could get on with their lives.
None of those Labour MPs who’d told their colleagues they expected to lose did so. And perfectly confident Conservative MPs suddenly found their majorities had disappeared, either to nothing or to just a few votes. In all, 33 Tories lost their seats, and 22 of their colleagues who held on did so by a margin of 1,000 or less.
Normally, after knocking on so many doors, parliamentary candidates get to the end of an election with the most detailed picture possible of what voters want from their party.
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