Beginning to digest the election..

I think I'm finally starting to digest the election, so I'm ready to write more than a paragraph. The interesting question concerns whether it was right or not for the Conservatives to field candidates in every seat.

My view before the election was that they should've stood down in a few seats where the Tories never win in order to give the Brexit Party a free run. However, with the Conservatives getting a whopping majority it's pretty hard to criticise the plan they went with. Certainly in places like Hartlepool and Barnsley it looks like Brexit Party candidates (or alternately Conservative candidates perhaps) could've won had the leave vote been united behind a single person. It's easy to see this in hindsight though, and in many other seats the Brexit Party vote share wasn't quite as impressive.

This is something I'll come back to later. It's worth noting though that my biggest failing before the election was underestimating the silent Conservative vote. For instance, going solely by social media profile the Conservative campaign in Hartlepool looked almost none existent. Yet Stefan Houghton pulled in 11,869 votes, a thousand more than Richard Tice. Even in Middlesbrough the Conservative candidate was comfortably in second place. The 8,812 votes Ruth Betson pulled in were hard to find in the run up to the election. I saw the odd person saying they were voting that way, but it was otherwise very quiet. Then bang, nine thousand votes, and this for a candidate based in Cambridgeshire.

So that's a great lesson to bear in mind going forward.

The Labour Party

As for the Labour Party I feel much more confident in my appraisals. Corbyn isn't quite gone yet (I bet many more grass-rootsy type people in the Labour Party will be reluctant to let him go, so who knows). However, all the talk now is about his successor ..and there's literally no one. There's not a single standout person who can potentially lift the party.

So we might be seeing its death. If it ends up being someone like Jess Philips or Emily Thornberry then they'll lose their grassroots support (and I would suspect any public appeal they have left too). If they go for a Corbynite candidate then it'll push many of the more Blairite people out, and they'll head towards being a full-on old school socialist party. Again will limited appeal. Though in that scenario at least with some authenticity.

Whichever root they go down will result in some kind of split, and on both sides there's a sheer lack intellect. That's a bit of a pretentious word to use, but I can't think of a better one. There simply doesn't seem to be anyone left with any real gravitas.