The British General Election of 2019

"This is the Nuffield election series publication on this election. The series has been going since the 1940s. It is simply the best book on the general election if you want to know what happened and how the parties approached it. The beautiful thing about this book and all the books in the series is that, because it’s an established series, everyone talks to them. All the insiders, the people who did the data, the people who draw up the manifestos will all talk to the authors. So you get this fantastic coverage, but it’s very, very detailed and it takes a long time to read. But if you want an insight into what happened in 2019, this is the single best thing you can read. Arguably that’s the wrong question to ask me personally because I co-wrote the Brexit chapter. But Brexit played into it very, very strongly indeed. I think there’s more reason to call the 2019 election the Brexit election than there was to call 2017 the Brexit election, for a variety of reasons. One important one was sheer fatigue. Voters who wouldn’t perhaps have been amenable to vote for a simple three-word slogan—’Take Back Control’—three years earlier, by 2019 would have done anything to put themselves out of the misery of Brexit. That was one of the strengths of the Boris Johnson campaign—his message of ‘Get Brexit Done’. And, of course, he was helped by the fact that the Labour position, drawn up by Jeremy Corbyn and Kier Starmer, was ‘we will drag this out, we’ll have a referendum, we’ll stay neutral in the referendum because we still, after four years, can’t quite figure out where we stand on this’. So there was absolute clarity on the key issue of the day versus absolute fudge on the clear issue of the day. That helped the Tories enormously."