Theresa may

This time tomorrow, the politicians will have finally fallen silent and the polls will be open. But who to vote for? Here’s what the papers say: The Sun backs Theresa May and has a ‘simple message’ for those considering voting for Ukip or Labour: ‘don’t’. Given that the ‘Tories alone are committed to seeing Brexit through in full’, the Sun suggests a vote for the 'Kippers would be redundant. And for those who believe Labour will ensure Brexit happens, the Sun says that it 'does not believe' it 'for a second’. For those who have always voted Labour, the Sun says to remember that Corbyn's party ‘is not the moderate Labour of Tony Blair’.

It is not often, especially in the midst of what has been a grimly dreadful election campaign for her, that one feels some measure of pity for Theresa May. But there she was today, gamely putting on her bravest, gamest, face when she was asked for her reaction to Donald Trump’s latest witless provocations.  The American president, you can hardly failed to have noticed, has not covered himself in glory since the weekend’s terrorist attack in London. When the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, suggested that Londoners should not be alarmed by the deployment of additional armed officers on the streets of London, Trump blustered “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!

For the second time in this election, political campaigning is suspended because of a terrorist attack. Given the volume of terrorist attacks—three in the last three months and five other plots disrupted—you might think that the issue would have dominated the campaign. But it hasn’t. Until Theresa May’s statement today talking about how there has been too much tolerance for extremism, there has been remarkably little discussion about how this country should deal with this problem. Now, you can say that we shouldn’t allow the terrorists to set the agenda. But I fear that the main reason for the absence of debate is that no one is quite sure what to do. However, it is imperative that we start talking seriously about the steps we can take.

When the Conservatives were rebranded “Theresa May’s team” and the party's name purged from its literature, there were two explanations. One, that the UK system of Cabinet government doesn’t suit the Prime Minister, so wants an election where she’d campaign by diktat in order to govern by diktat. She'd go fetch a three-figure majority, then her Cabinet meetings would be a bit like the Spitting Image sketch about vegetables (above). The other explanation was more plausible, and benign: that her personal approval ratings were the highest recorded for any Prime Minister so it made sense for the Tories to campaign on the leader.

Theresa May turned in what, I think, was her best TV performance of the election tonight. May engaged with the questions more than she has in previous TV events, and was more confident and fluent than she had been on Monday night. After a prolonged Tory wobble, her performance will have steadied jangling Tory nerves. May pitched hard for the Brexit vote. She said that she had called the election ‘for Brexit’ and that if you voted Leave, you needed to make sure you got it. When she was accused of calling the election for political gain, she hit back saying that she had had the balls to call an election rather than just serving out the term the Tories had won in 2015. Her deliberate use of the word balls was very Thatcheresque, deliberately flipping the language of gender.

On the eve of the US presidential election, experts at Princeton university decided that Donald Trump had a 1 per cent chance of being elected. Before the last general election, Populus, the opinion poll firm, gave David Cameron a 0.5 per cent chance of winning a majority. Much is made of the need to look at ‘the data’ when considering political arguments, but so often it is a wildly inaccurate guess with a decimal point at the end to give an aura of scientific specificity. So when we read that Jeremy Corbyn has just a 17 per cent chance of becoming prime minister, this does not mean that the election is in the bag. The Tories are still quite capable of blowing it. It’s understandable that voters have misgivings about Theresa May.