I distinctly remember the night of the 12th of December 2019. It had been raining, and I had come out of Kingston Station, walking towards my flat some half a mile away from it. Being December, and close to Christmas, it came as close to a British winter as you could get: bitter, but damp. It had been raining heavily, and my coat was getting heavier by the second. I had my head ducked down, trying to keep out of the wet as much as I could, though little good it did. I stopped off at the Costa Coffee by the station, picked up an Americano without milk, and proceeded on my way, knowing that I had one final job to do before settling down for the evening. Election days always get me tense, whether it was back in Denmark or in Britain. Upon becoming a full British citizen in 2017, I had exercised my rights as a subject to be able to vote and to participate in British democracy. I had only voted in one previous election in Denmark, and on that occasion I had gone to the Danish Embassy to vote for Kristian Thulesen Dahl's Danske Folkeparti, much to the chagrin of my twin sister, an ardent supporter of the reigining Socialdemokraterne. In 2016, I had voted for Brexit: yes a European citizen who had all the benefits of having an EU passport, freedom of movement and the wonders of socialised healthcare, voted for everything that he should've been against. The 'turkey voting for Christmas', I had been told by so-called, self-described 'intellectuals' over Twitter.
I had voted for this because it simply falls within my beliefs to do so. I am against centralised government and in favour of local autonomy. I believe in limiting the size of the state, and you cannot get much bigger than that of the European Union. I am opposed to Empire, and in a sense, the European Union acts much like its own personal Empire, imposing authority upon people who do not wish it to be there, taking away identity from nations and imposing its own morality. The European Union reminded me a lot of what my grandfather had told me 1940s Denmark had been like: a centralised force ran by Germany coming along and stripping the rights of the people of other nations for political gain. I had never realised it as a young boy, but the European Union had been just a part of our lives that we had grown to accept. My mother and father are Social Democrats, and still believe in the expansion of the European Union to allow more countries to remain. I was approaching my second birthday when Danes went to the polls in 1992, narrowly rejecting the Maastricht Treaty, imposing a federal Europe upon the country with new rules and regulations and brought in further 'European integration' into the country. Yes, it was a narrow result, with only 50.7% of voters rejecting the treaty, but the European Union forced their own agenda upon the people and demanded a second referendum the following year take place. The government at the time, headed by pro-EU Social Democrat Poul Rasmussen, bent over and allowed the European Union to impose another referendum until the result went their way. It wasn't until I was around sixteen that I knew about this, and a sense of soft Euroscepticism dwelled within me. Though for a long time, and I make no bones about it, I was a liberal, I still did not understand the significance, reason or importance behind the EU's very existence. In liberal circles at Oxford, I was very much an outsider for my views on the EU, and I received repetitive questions as to why an immigrant did not like the glorious European Union. Despite my arguments, words fell on deaf ears and accusations of 'racism' began, even though my reasoning was not because of immigration or a supposed 'fear of people with different accents', considering I am a person with a different accent. Most 'racist' Brexit supporters tend to talk to me like a regular human being, something I can say that very few Remain voters do.
The Brexit negotiations, for the last four years, have been a fiasco. Parliament did 'dither and delay' for as long as they could, hoping that the negotiations could simply be thrown away and that the people would not simply care anymore. It was a deliberate strategy, set up by the worst Prime Minister of the last hundred years in Theresa May, a woman who I regrettably supported and backed in 2017, against my better will, in the hopes that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party would not get anywhere near 10 Downing Street. Following a disastrous election for Mrs May in June 2017, in which she lost her slim parliamentary majority, and with heavy defeats in the Commons due to her ineffective plans for leaving the EU, the party faithful and the general public were getting frustrated. Brexit backers did not see the negotiations as upholding the result in 2016, nor did the Remain camp see the negotiations as ending the deadlock that parliament was in. To quote Obi Wan: 'You'll never see a more wretched hive of scum and villainy' than that of the House of Commons during the negotiations. May was weak and incompetent: a Remainer who acted like a Remainer would. Her government was collapsing. The 'strong and stable' image had vanished. Gracefully, she knew that she was not up to the job and resigned in early 2019, prompting a new Conservative Party leader to step in and take the reins. Enter Boris Johnson.
I was initially disappointed that Johnson did not run for leadership following David Cameron's resignation after the referendum. Johnson, a supporter of Brexit, could have ended the negotiations and delivered had he chosen to step to the plate. Three years later was too late: most of the damage by parliament had already been done. On the 24th of July, Boris Johnson was appointed Prime Minister and immediately got to work. He removed the whip from his 'wets' in government, prompting a mass walkout of Europhile MPs, reshuffled the cabinet with staunch Brexiteers and launched a vicious, but necessary campaign against Messers Corbyn and McDonnell. Johnson's Tories were gaining momentum, and Labour were frightened. Johnson posed the biggest threat to them. Despite being a bumbling, Eton-education, buffoon of a man, Boris Johnson is an excellent campaigner. No Tory could win London twice as mayor, and yet he could. He was not part of the establishment, much like his opponent in Jeremy Corbyn, but Johnson was more ruthless and played to the camera better than Corbyn could. With deadlock still needed, Johnson gave parliament an ultimatum, and one that would change the course of the Brexit saga: back this, or I will take it to the people. Corbyn shot himself in the foot by taking the latter option.
Like I said, for all of Johnson's lunacy at times, he is an excellent campaigner and an underrated orator. Johnson may bumble around, but his main message of the 2019 campaign was clear, concise and to the point: Get Brexit Done. It appealed to the people who backed Brexit in 2019, and was the message that Johnson and the Tories went with during the campaign. The Tories had been in disarray for at least two years since the 2017 General Election, but were now campaigning on a united front. CINOs like Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve were out, and fresh, new blood was in. Young, Northern and LGBTQ candidates were now standing as candidates in key marginals. Corbyn, for all the sycophantic, brown-nosing idiocy that one might see on Twitter, could not muster the same response; he was simply not ready for any campaigning. You see, on the campaign trail, Boris Johnson looked more comfortable talking to people, in and out of diving into fridges: he liked people, and appealed to the working class in the North especially, not only because of his clear message, but because he spoke in a way that many in those communities did. Only less than forty years ago, areas like Bishop Auckland, Redcar, Sedgefield and Blyth Valley were baying for any Tory blood, and now these Brexit-backing areas of the Northern Labour heartlands were going blue. Corbyn's plan for a exit strategy that would keep the UK in the Single Market and the Customs Union whilst having no representation in the European Parliament that would enact laws against this country, whilst also simultaneously planning to campaign in a referendum against their own deal, betrayed the once great heartlands that backed Labour. Corbyn seemed awkward around people that weren't wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and had thirteen different colours in their hair. He was baying to a different crowd: the metropolitan, middle class student. The only seat Labour picked up was Putney, a wealthy area of London where Roehampton University is situated, where the average GDP is £133,093. Corbyn's appeal to the middle class only applied to young people, with promises to increase the size of the state, abolish tuition fees and offer free internet (state sponsored, of course), free insulation (state sponsored again) and free school meals for all children (state spons...you get the drill).
What did not help Corbyn were his greatest allies. Ash 'I'm Literally A Communist' Sarkar and Aaron 'Poppies Are A Sign Of White Supremacy' Bastani, running their pro-Corbyn propaganda show through Novara Media, spreading toxicity and misinformation through their feeds, surprisingly did not resonate with patriotic, working class Northerners. Multimillionaires like Steve Coogan going on Channel 4 calling Brexit supporters 'stupid' didn't surprisingly sway traditional Labour voters in the North who also backed Brexit back to Corbyn, but rather back to Boris's Tories. And that's what the Tories did best at this election: they let Labour hang themselves. The toxic environment that Labour was leaving, from Brexit, to sympathies with communism and the plague of antisemitism following the Corbyn camp, was killing Labour quicker than the Tories could. It was said of Michael Foot's 1983 manifesto that it was the 'longest suicide note written in history', and the same could be said about Corbyn's 2019 campaign. Much like Hillary Clinton's disastrous 2016 campaign, celebrity endorsements ultimately killed Corbyn's image as they helped to inadvertently put the knife through his back, such as Hugh Grant who called Brexit voters 'racist' and 'imbeciles', and all four of the candidates he backed lost in their constituencies. When it looked as if Labour were losing badly on election night, leaked Labour Party HQ WhatsApp messages revealed that panicking campaigners were planning on using thousands of bot accounts to flood Twitter with pro-Corbyn/anti-Boris hashtags that they bought to make trending, to make it look as if Corbyn was winning. Though in the days to come Corbyn would say that he 'won the argument', all this made it look like him sound was a surgeon stating: 'well, the operation was a complete success, except the patient is dead.'
Corbyn's Labour became the party of protests and armchair activists. It's important to fight for what you believe in, and I commend Corbyn for that (it is the only thing he seems to have done his whole life). However, when you have activists (such as a notorious student doctor who wished the Prime Minister a 'slow and painful death'), shouting the odds whilst offering nothing of value, calling people 'racist', 'homophobes' and 'sexist' for voting against you, what you find is that you don't resonate with anyone. Tories did not have to retort to such nonsense, and let Labour do all the talking instead to let the rope tighten around their necks, much like Trump did in 2016. If you want to sway voters who might have considered voting for you as 'ignorant', 'misinformed', 'racist' or anything of any prerogative, cannot possibly turn into votes for you. And the Labour left frothed at the mouth, still blamed the media, the Jews, fascists, etc. for their defeat. Corbyn couldn't blame his own wrongdoings for his defeat; his fans helped him in the same way. On camera and social media, Corbyn may have looked like the second coming of Christ, but to the general public, outside of the bubble, he was just a bland, dull and unappealing man. Whilst Boris undoubtedly has many flaws, and since that day one year on, he is being exposed more and more, there is no doubt that he was key to Tory success in 2019.
One year on and Corbynism might be kicking somewhere, and it may have screamed and shouted once, but now it is silent, and the flights of angels have sent it to its rest.
