If you believe, as I do, that what roils America’s closest ally, Great Britain, should be of interest to Americans, then you may want to scope out Andrew Sullivan’s latest in his Intelligencer column. He dispenses with his usual tripartite diary entry to write an in-depth investigation into Britain’s current Prime Minister and one of Sullivan’s successors as President of the Oxford Union, the eponymous university’s legendary debating society, Boris Johnson, and it’s quite an interesting piece. At this point, he’s discussing the most recent polling as Britain approaches a new election, as Johnson promises Brexit will occur after the election:
So far, the gamble appears to be paying off. A huge poll of over 100,000 Brits by YouGov last month, using the same methods that had rightly predicted a hung Parliament in 2017, showed a possible Tory majority of 68 seats. In the poll, the Tories held on to their traditional base in the South but made striking gains in the North, turning long-held Labour seats into Tory ones overnight. It is the same dynamic that saw the Democrats lose the Rust Belt swing states in 2016. The poll shows Labour at 32 percent with the Lib Dems at 14, while the Tories have 43 percent support and the Brexit Party has collapsed to 3 percent. Boris’s strategy destroyed both the former U.K.
Independence Party and then the Brexit Party — the two parties of the far right. Divide and conquer was how Thatcher won three times in a row in parliamentary seats despite never having majority support in the country as a whole. If Boris wins, it will be by the same strategy.
Jeremy Corbyn is the current leader of the Labour Party, the rival of Johnson’s Conservative Party. His positions include nationalizing various industries; Sullivan has previously reported that anti-Semitic rumors have followed Corbyn around. To my eye, he appears to be a firm believer in returning to a Golden Age which was only golden for those in charge. If he leads Labour into an abyss of public disapproval, he may be out on his ass.
Sullivan’s outlook on Johnson has certainly picked up over the last few months, going from “second-class mind” to a grudging admiration, but then Sullivan’s often able to see both sides of a coin at once – a capability only rarely seen in ideologues and even pundits.
But I remain concerned that this may weaken Europe as a whole with regards to Russian ambitions. Brexit may be necessary for the Brits to assess where they want to be in regards to their big neighbor across the Channel – in a few years, we may see a re-entry on terms deeply informed by their first wedding to, and divorce from, Europe. But how far will Russian ambitions advance in the meantime, especially with a Russia-friendly Trump still in the Oval Office?
