In a post-election interview Jeremy Corbyn claimed that the Tories had "lost" the election and that Labour had "won". These strange interpretations of the words suggest that "post-truth" phenomena are not limited to the loonier reaches of the Republican party in the United States.
The Tories won most seats, and the biggest percentage of the popular vote. They won the election.
Just not as well as they expected.
I saw an analysis of constituencies into which the Tories had poured resources. It turned out that they had tried hard in areas which turned out to be unwinnable, neglecting more realistic constituencies which, had they won, would have given them an increased majority. Hubris, you might say. You might also ask why the Tories did not implement the Boundary Commission report while they had the opportunity. Doing so would have given them dozens more seats.
A good deal of blame has been attached to Mrs May for calling an "unnecessary" election. I think it's misplaced. Some people have reacted with horror to the notion that a politician might try and outmanouevre their opponents by exploiting a time of weakness. That's fake outrage. Labour would have done the same; and keeping a foot on your enemy's throat is a legitimate and necessary posture in any oppositional endeavour. Besides, Mrs May can argue that even as things stand she has bought for HMG a further two years in which to get Brexit done and implemented, instead of the electoral cycle coinciding awkwardly with the end of the negotiations. She can even argue that the country has benefited from that extra period of grace. She has also shot the SNP fox.
It's surely OK for Tories to criticise May for running an ineffective campaign, but for her opponents to lambast her for not winning by a big enough margin is an approach which scarcely qualifies as a thought, let alone one which has been pursued to its end.
All depends on May being able to stay in office long enough. At this stage a confidence and supply agreement has been reached with the DUP in principle. May's critics are outraged by the party's more fundamentalist aspects, but unpalatable as the DUP may be, these are the same people who excused Tim Farron's attitude to gay sex just a few short weeks ago.
You see, it's different when liberals are homophobic.
No, we must blame the result on the electorate. They - we - voted like this. Now they - we - must live with it.
The most depressing aspect of the result is not the what but the why. Corbyn's Labour Party showed that if you promise people the thing they most want and tell them that someone else will pay for it, they will vote for you en masse. Large numbers of young people have no experience of Labour's propensity for wrecking the economy. They don't know that every Labour administration has ended with unemployment higher than when it began. They see Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as benign paternal figures rather than the cold-eyed murderers they were when Corbyn was cuddling up to them. They shrug when you point out that an MP (Naz Shah) who had to apologise for anti-Semitism only last year is still in the Labour Party and was re-elected last week with a massively increased majority.
The young shriek that they are hard done by, and yet they have enjoyed staggeringly higher standards of living than the baby boomers they despise, and emerge from the - far more extensive - higher education opportunities available to them to find massive numbers of jobs available. I contrast this with my own experience as a school-leaver in 1977 and despair at the impossibility of getting even my own children to accept they are better off.
The young seem to have one legitimate grievance, which is the shortage and expense of housing. And yet this too is a chimera. In the first place housing is expensive because of the excess of demand over supply. Which demographic is most likely to approve of the migration which has substantially caused it? Why, it's the young. Moreover, once you can get on the housing ladder, interest rates are the lowest they have been in my lifetime, making mortgage repayments reasonably consistent with historical standards.
The problem is the deposit required to buy your first house. Deposits are high because house prices are high. It requires saving. And yet when I go about of an evening, I don't see empty pubs, restaurants, theatres and cinemas. I see young people out spending and enjoying themselves. Perhaps my generation has taught them to live for today. But that is I think the only responsibility we should bear.
Some claim it is legitimate for Labour to appeal to pensioners because the Tories appeal to the old. But there is a difference. The Tories are insisting on protecting the interests of vulnerable people on less than £10,000 a year. Labour is trying to protect people in their first flush, with their peak earning years ahead of them.
Those of us on the centre and right of British politics thought that the lessons of socialism had been learned. We were wrong. Unless the Tories are very very careful in the next five years they are going to have to be learned all over again.
