But Once Again You Should Know That Youre Going to Dominate My Thoughts Even Over Laura
Laura Kuenssberg: Signing off later seven dizzying years
Laura Kuenssberg
Political editor
@bbclaurakon Twitter
Prototype source, Alamy
Laura on College Green in 2017, shortly afterwards a General Election was announced.
This won't be the last article I write, but it will exist the last one in my job as the BBC's political editor. Before I movement on, I've been trying to piece together some of the seismic events that have taken place - the Brexit plebiscite, the pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn'due south stormy leadership of the Labour Party, 3 dissimilar prime number ministers.
Information technology was an extraordinary menses, and to help make sense of some of it, I've been comparing notes with five politicians, all of whom were, in one way or another, primal to the political battles that went on.
"If you call back that the people of this country are going to vote to hurt their wallets, you've got some other think coming! Information technology's never happened in 100 years, and it's not going to happen now!"
It was 2016 and I'd been the BBC's political editor for nearly a twelvemonth. I had called one of the campaign chiefs at Remain HQ to to see how things were going. But rather than chatting well-nigh their plans for the crucial last few days, they launched into a tirade against their opponents.
They were bellowing loudly - furious, perchance, because they had started to sense the vote slipping abroad from them. Tempers flare in politics. People intendance a lot about winning. They piece of work all hours and get tired and cross. That hasn't changed in 7 years. Normally, the side by side day information technology's forgotten.
Merely that aroused, one-sided conversation stuck in my heed. A highly successful political operative just would not, and could non, believe that the British public might defy convention and vote against what most economic experts agreed even then was in their own, and the land's, financial involvement.
Warnings of economic chaos had worked to secure David Cameron a majority in the 2015 election (although don't forget Labour's historic collapse in Scotland did its fleck to transport him to Number 10, too). Simply the referendum was different. It posed questions about identity, about the UK's place in the globe. And the issue showed conventional wisdom was for fools. It hadn't bargained on the Eurosceptics hunting out new voters, and using new ways to enthuse them.
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I was what I was, and was outside the norm completely
Nigel Farage, the onetime UKIP leader who had campaigned so noisily to have the vote, looks back at how the Eurosceptic movement defied the odds and broke the establishment "rules".
He describes the referendum equally an "insurgency". "I met lots of people who told me, 'I've never voted in my life', but expressed themselves in the European union vote," he recalls. In fact, nearly three meg more than people voted in the referendum than voted in the previous General Election. Farage's candidature had always pitched him as something different, a politician proud of non fitting in. "I was what I was, and was outside the norm completely," he says.
Of class, courting controversy for political effect isn't new.
Farage describes how he went about it: "I had a deliberate technique. I'd say, right, I'm gonna go and say this at this press conference, I know exactly what the reaction is going to be. In that location'll exist howls of indignation. At that place'll be demands that I apologise. And what I'll exercise tomorrow is double down."
He joked to me that Boris Johnson has partly stolen his technique. This was existence willing to say publicly what, before 2015, might not have been acceptable in mainstream politics, to create arguments, to make political points, and to send messages to the public about who they are.
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Cameron told ministers, 'Campaign in what yous believe is in the best interests of your country'
The Brexiteers knew the odds were confronting them in virtually every traditional sense. And think the official campaign, Vote Exit, wanted aught to do with Farage's more controversial tactics. Nonetheless they resolved that their route to victory would be to run a different kind of aggressive campaign, making statements they knew would besides provoke, and deliberately targeting a blend of messages at voters who may never have cast a ballot before, or who had checked out of politics in the previous decade. They tried to attract voters for whom the economy had washed no favours at all.
Andrea Leadsom was one of the serving Tory ministers who joined that campaign. She and so made her mode into the Cabinet, fifty-fifty running to go Prime number Minister when Boris Johnson's entrada blew itself up.
"Out on the streets talking to people - they [would] say, 'Well I don't really desire to acknowledge it in public merely yes, I'm going to vote to Leave,''' she tells me.
David Cameron's Remain entrada was more conventional than the Brexiteers', and when he did roam outside the norm and allowed members of his own team to push for Leave, information technology was arguably a political error.
"I distinctly recollect David Cameron calling ministers in and saying to all of us: 'What you lot all have to do is campaign in what yous believe is in the best interests of your country, not [in] what the political party is telling you to do,'" says Leadsom. "And that was an extraordinary matter for him to do. And I retrieve it spelt doom."
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Prime Minister David Cameron on his campaign bus in 2016 on the final mean solar day of campaigning
The prime minister of the 24-hour interval suspended the normal rules by allowing his squad to campaign confronting him. A referendum in itself is an unconventional thing in the UK. Just, as the issue indicated, convention itself had gone out the window.
The referendum came afterward what had too, on paper, seemed like a huge political upset.
Farage might not relish a comparison to the one-time Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn - and Corbyn won't be as well happy with it, either. Just they have something in common - straying deliberately from the norm. In 2015, the long-serving left winger had already prospered by courting new or disaffected voters, and claiming the mantle of the outsider for himself.
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And so, along comes Jeremy Corbyn [and says] I'll tell you why the system doesn't work
The chair of his campaign for the Labour leadership was John McDonnell, who became the shadow chancellor. McDonnell says his comrade'southward portrayal of being beyond the norm, "was a huge attraction".
"Remember, after five years of austerity people had had it bad plenty. They weren't only questioning what was happening day-to-mean solar day, they were questioning the whole system. So along comes Jeremy Corbyn [and says] actually, I'll tell you lot why the system doesn't piece of work."
Jeremy Corbyn's campaign forged a different coalition - there were the thousands upon thousands of new voters who joined the party for the first time, and those on the left of the party who felt it had drifted too far from its soul.
McDonnell says they consciously decided to pursue victory in novel ways.
"Across the normal party politics out there, were a whole range of social movements - the anti-war movement, the people campaigning against austerity and cuts. And nosotros basically said, 'Look, we tin can win this election if we invite those [groups] into a discussion around more formal politics and getting them to vote as well.' And that'southward what we did."
And throughout his time, during his struggle to establish control over the Labour Party, he connected to please many of his supporters, and irritate many others in the Labour movement by refusing to conform.
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Boris Johnson holds upwards a kipper at the final Conservative Party leadership election hustings in 2019
Which brings u.s.a. to the politician who turned a beloved for pushing convention, into a ticket to Number 10. Boris Johnson is a career politician - just like Corbyn and Farage - although, like them, he would argue otherwise. To claim Johnson is not a member of the elites he has derided, is to ignore the facts. Yet, every bit someone who has - both as a columnist, and a politician - tried to write his ain headlines, the prime number minister has got to the summit with a technique of saying and sometimes doing what others cartel non practice.
His backers say it's because he's being accurate. I remember a chat with a voter in Middlesbrough during the 2019 election campaign who said: "I like Boris because he's just like me. He likes beer, he likes women, and he makes mistakes." Whatever your view on whether those are qualifications for high office, there'southward no uncertainty that Johnson's willingness to be edgeless, to be prepared to offend, and yeah, to break the rules, has been seen past many voters as a welcome refreshment from smooth, technocratic politicians I've been told so oftentimes are "still".
One senior minister still now finds Johnson's credible need to provoke, to bluster, frustrating. "It's just non funny anymore," they say. But the provocateur is the 1 in power. It'south not remotely clear if the new voting coalition that Boris Johnson built on the foundation of the Brexit vote will see him stay in function for the second term he craves. Yet his huge political personality makes it hard for others to find space to breathe.
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David and Theresa had a basic respect for truth and civilised debate, which I don't recall we accept in the current incumbent
That trend of convention-busting worries others, though. Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, is one of the tiny number of politicians who was at the summit of her game at the start of this era, and who is all the same there.
"I recollect some of the conventions accept been smashed to bits," she tells me. "And I retrieve the rules of engagement have undoubtedly changed." The commencement minister, who is no fan of Boris Johnson, continues: "I've had deep differences, obviously, with both David Cameron and Theresa May. But, you know, I reflect back on dealing with them and they had a respect for the role. I think they had a bones respect for truth and civilised debate, which I'm distressing to say, I don't think we have in the current incumbent."
During our conversation, Sturgeon also reflects on how politicians have been challenged during this era in ways that they could merely never accept dreamt of. During the pandemic their choices influenced all of us in ways they hadn't for generations. Their decisions were matters of life and expiry.
She recalls a sense of dread. "Around about half dozen o'clock, on a Friday evening, the streets were deserted and I was passing pub after pub. [They were] closing their doors and pulling the shutters downward. It was incredible, simply such an eerie, unsettling feeling. And I think the affair that was near difficult as a leader to come up to terms with was that there were no decisions you could take that wouldn't have caused harm in some style. There were no decisions you lot could take that would simply magically make everything better."
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The 1 boggling point of stability throughout this whole period is that the Conservatives take been in function
Matt Hancock, who was health secretary during the pandemic, reflects on his toughest moments, from that time. One, he says, was the intense worry during the second lockdown in January 2021 when case numbers were rising even after ministers had taken desperate activeness.
"They just kept going upwardly, and the numbers in hospital kept going upward. When nosotros hit 40,000… well, that'south nearly one-half of all the beds in hospitals. And so that was the hardest menses considering yous knew there was nothing more yous could do. And if it didn't turn, it would have been truly, truly, truly awful, every bit opposed to just awful."
And the pandemic came hard on the heels of the most intense flow of political change we've lived through for a long time. Information technology's turmoil, Matt Hancock tells me is documented on his walls.
"I've got on my wall pictures of iv unlike cabinets that I was in - the David Cameron coalition cabinet, the Cameron mail service 2015 majority government cabinet, the Theresa May cabinet and the Boris Johnson chiffonier. And there's hardly whatsoever people who are in all four."
In the terminate, of course, he suffered his own embarrassing exit.
One of the topics that all of the five that I've been speaking to about the past few years is the impact technological alter has had on politics.
John McDonnell talked about how new campaign methods played a central part to crowning Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
"We had all these immature people alluvion into the campaign, with ideas and techniques I'd never even heard of. And it was all social media," he says. "They knew how to target games, [then] we set up a group called 'games for the many'. And they invented games that people could play that would lead them into a political contend and support for Jeremy."
Image source, Getty Images
A supporter of Jeremy Corbyn attends a launch of policy ideas for young people in 2015
Politics online has inverse how debates are conducted in the House of Commons, too. And that's not merely considering you run into and so many MPs with heads bowed, staring at their phones. Nowadays, speeches aren't just designed for Television set sound bites, just sometimes for the snippet for social media, in the promise information technology volition go viral. Andrea Leadsom jokes most the weekly face-offs between Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May: "I ever felt... she might say, you know, happy birthday, Jeremy. And he'd be like, that'due south not good enough!... if you were there, information technology made no sense. But it was clearly a script that was designed for social media."
Nigel Farage admits that without engineering he would never have been able to build his profile, to have the profound effect that he has had on our politics. "I wouldn't accept been a household proper noun without YouTube," he jokes.
As Nicola Sturgeon quipped, it'due south quicker to list what hasn't changed in the by seven years, than what has.
Engineering has immune toxicity to spread more hands into our debates. The country made a big ramble conclusion that stunned the political establishment, only the effects of which are yet to exist fully understood. Rule breakers have prospered, for now, and stability has gone out of way.
The one lesson to take from a dizzying time, perhaps, is that relying on conventional wisdom is a fool's game. A heartfelt thank you for following the boggling events of the by seven years along with me. And there'll be more to come, from a unlike chair, in a few months' fourth dimension.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-60934380
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