Will turning the Tories into the pro-Leave party pay off for Boris?

An election might still be months away, but the parties have already made their big strategic choices. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats are betting that Brexit is the defining issue of our times and that its pull is strong enough to dissolve longstanding party allegiances. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, is planning on fighting a much more traditional left vs right campaign. His second-referendum policy is almost an attempt to quarantine the issue of Brexit.

Since becoming leader, Boris Johnson has reshaped the Tory party in an attempt to make it fit for purpose in an era when politics is defined by Brexit. He has abandoned Theresa May’s tolerance of dissent on this issue. Instead, he has decided that the Tory position must be unambiguous — hence the decision to take the whip away from the 21 Tory MPs who attempted to block no deal. The price of admission for any Tory candidate is a willingness to support leaving with or without a deal.

The hope is that a clear pro-Leave position will both squeeze down the Brexit party, which is still polling in double digits, and enable the Tories to take a slew of Leave-voting seats in the north-east, the Midlands and Wales, areas that are traditionally Labour. Critics of the strategy point out that this is what May tried and failed to do in 2017. One crucial difference, however, is that Brexit seems genuinely in danger now in a way that it was not back then. If the Tories cannot form a government after the next election, it is hard to believe that Brexit will ever happen, given that Labour is committed to a second referendum and the Scottish Nationalists and the Lib Dems both want to revoke Article 50. This suggests that any second referendum would be heavily slanted against Leave, most likely by allowing 16-year-olds to vote and other such changes to the franchise.