Those who have worked with prime minister Boris Johnson longest doubted he would risk the job he had wanted his whole life after just three months in office.
But after a week of tense disagreement at the top of the Conservative party, and spurred on by the conviction of his chief aide Dominic Cummings that he would never have more favourable conditions for an election, the prime minister decided to bet the house.
The view ultimately taken by Johnson was that the Dec. 12 poll would be a huge gamble, but one that he had to take.
As the six-week campaign gets underway, BuzzFeed News can reveal concerns held by senior Tories about their chances of securing a majority, the dangers of holding an election in the midst of a looming NHS winter crisis, fears that Johnson will be unable to make this a single-issue election about Brexit — and that he could await the same fate as Theresa May when her own decision to go to the country in 2017 resulted in a hung Parliament.
The double-barrelled message you can expect to hear day in, day out over the next 43 days from Tory MPs is that Johnson will “get Brexit done”, so he can then focus on the things that really matter to voters, be that schools, policing, the NHS, housing, or other issues neglected by Westminster over the last three years and longer.
In Conservative headquarters (CCHQ), the party’s election campaign is being run by Isaac Levido, a former Australian Liberal Party strategist and Lynton Crosby protégé. Cummings and his team of former Vote Leave officials, who would be the first to admit that their real strengths lie in campaigning rather than governing, remain in Downing Street.
“Isaac has full grip over the campaign. Dom is in Number 10 with the Vote Leave team. CCHQ staff are answering to CCHQ, not Vote Leave,” a CCHQ insider said.
Central to the push for an election now was Cummings’ belief that it is easier for the Tories to win before leaving the EU than afterwards. Before Brexit, Johnson can accuse Labour and the Liberal Democrats of being responsible for it not happening and pitch himself as the only candidate capable of leading Britain out of the quagmire. After Brexit, an election would be solely about where to take the country next — a completely different ballgame and one possibly much more favourable to Labour and Jeremy Corbyn.
Tory aides in favour of going to the polls before Brexit is done often refer to Winston Churchill’s defeat in the 1945 election straight after the second world war, in which the Conservative prime minister was not rewarded by voters for delivering victory, and a radical Labour government was elected instead.
Internal polling has concluded that the public is sick of Brexit dominating the news and politics and, above all else, want it resolved as soon as possible.
But there are concerns among some Tory MPs that an election now damages one of Johnson’s main attack lines: that Parliament blocked Brexit. The decision to call the election despite having an apparent House of Commons majority for his deal and passing his Queen’s Speech means Johnson cannot so easily argue that he exhausted every means of delivering Brexit and that MPs did everything they could to block it.
Some MPs believe voters will see the election for what it is: a self-interested political calculation by Johnson rather than a last resort after Parliament stopped Brexit.
The principal risk repeatedly raised by Tory MPs who spoke to BuzzFeed News this week was that Labour and Corbyn would be successful in steering the election narrative away from resolving Brexit, towards the case for a fundamental upheaval of the wider political landscape in Britain.
With the memory of being stung by the so-called “dementia tax” manifesto disaster of 2017 fresh in their minds, MPs have privately raised the alarm about an election in the middle of the expected annual NHS winter crisis.
Several MPs said they had been warned that this winter’s NHS crisis was expected to be the worst in decades and that they were worried the government was struggling to properly prepare. This is the sort of thing that could quickly take the focus of the campaign away from Brexit onto terrain more friendly to Corbyn, one MP said.
Another MP said they believed Labour’s perennial warning that the Tories want to “sell off the NHS” will have more success in the context of a US trade deal after Brexit, making it harder for them to persuade typical Labour voters in Leave seats to vote Conservative for the first time. They said this week’s Dispatches investigation on “Trump’s plan for the NHS”, revealing that the price the UK pays for US medicines could soar under a trade deal with America, had the potential to be the story of the election outside of the Westminster bubble.
A Tory health source insisted that the NHS had made substantive preparations going into the winter and said health secretary Matt Hancock would be holding weekly meetings with Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, during the election campaign. The source said that the Tories would be pumping out positive messages about their record on the NHS during the campaign, adding that "on the NHS, attack is the best form of defence".
But on a visit to Whipps Cross hospital last month, Johnson was accosted by Omar Salem, a parent and Labour activist who harangued the prime minister about NHS underfunding under successive Tory governments. The potential for spontaneous and unpredictable incidents like this during the campaign has led some Tories to question whether putting the NHS at the centre of Johnson's domestic agenda could backfire.
CCHQ veterans are sceptical whether, despite the vast spending commitments made by Johnson over the last few months, the Tories’ new domestic agenda has cut through to the public.
Over the summer the prime minister made announcement after announcement committing billions of pounds of new money more education, health, and police spending, but CCHQ insiders told BuzzFeed News that the massive outlay had not made a dent in terms of public opinion.
“Never has so much been spent on so many policies, noticed by so few,” an experienced Tory official said.
Senior Conservatives put their chances of forming a government on Dec. 13 at between fifty-fifty and two-thirds in favour.
The path to a Johnson majority has been made slightly easier after he restored the whip to 10 of the 21 Tory rebels who opposed his Brexit plans last month. But the Tories still go into the election well short of a majority and likely to lose their foothold in Scotland as well as further seats to the Liberal Democrats in areas of England where support for EU membership remains strong.
To win a majority healthy enough to comfortably pass his Brexit deal, Johnson would have to gain Labour seats far away from their usual target list — and with the added unknown factor of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party eating away at their vote in Leave areas.
The fear among Conservatives throughout the party is that they fall short and that Parliament remains hung and deadlocked. The potential of Corbyn in Downing Street in coalition with the Scottish Nationalist Party is a risk some Tories did not want to take. But there is a growing worry that, even if Johnson has the numbers to stay in Downing Street but the Commons remains at an impasse, the conversation will turn to another long Brexit extension and a second referendum as the only way to find a definitive answer.
There are also logistical doubts within CCHQ about the uncharted waters of a December poll. Initial projections from Tory strategists suggested that postal voting is likely to be higher, potentially favouring Labour, and that the Tories would find it harder than Labour to mobilise activists to leaflet and knock on doors, in part because Labour’s activist base is younger and more likely to campaign in the dark and during bad weather.
Overall, while its various factions disagreed over when to go for an election, Number 10 is united in the belief that it ultimately has the team and message to win. One Tory who spoke to BuzzFeed News talked about “positive fatalism” — the idea that the choice facing the country was clear, an election to break the deadlock in Parliament was inevitable at some point, and that if voters genuinely preferred Corbyn, then so be it.