Not long now. A few more hours for party activists to persuade voters into backing their competing pitches and then this wretched election will invite each of us to complete its private formalities. By Friday, what we have collectively decided will begin to emerge.
This snap poll was supposed to be the Brexit election. Theresa May called it, she claimed, to strengthen her hand in negotiating the best possible terms for the UK as it leaves the European Union. Yet, apart from a stark warning that she would walk away from any deal if the remaining 27 EU member states started to cut up rough, Brexit and its implications have barely featured.
Of course, the terror attacks in Manchester and London have disrupted normal electioneering and pushed national security to the forefront of public consciousness. No one could have foreseen that. Yet it is at times like these that those who aspire to lead us can expect to have their leadership qualities stress-tested most forensically.
As campaigning draws to a close, we know as little about what Mrs May’s negotiating hand on Brexit will look like as we did when she sprang her election surprise. Even if she is returned as prime minister, the past six weeks have significantly diminished the stature she enjoyed when she entered Downing Street last July. It’s not merely the failure to engage fully with rivals in public debate, or the rapid U-turns on policy initiatives, like the so-called dementia tax, when they encounter instant resistance. It’s whether the policy prescriptions proposed are sufficiently thought-through to meet the scale of the challenges facing us.
Yesterday Mrs May sent Boris Johnson to Co Durham to announce that a new Conservative government would resurrect the Board of Trade, a 17th-century invention of Oliver Cromwell, to spearhead winning new trade deals in nine regions of the world when we leave the EU.
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But the Board of Trade was never abolished. It still exists, as a rarely convened committee of the Privy Council. Its president is Liam Fox, who has served in Mrs May’s first cabinet as secretary of state for international trade. Where has this Glasgow-trained doctor been throughout this election campaign, one wonders? Shoring up his 23,000-plus majority in North Somerset? Will he even figure in the Brexit negotiations that are scheduled to start within days of the polls closing?
The prime minister is not alone in having how she plans to deliver subjected to electoral scrutiny. In Scotland Nicola Sturgeon is being held to account on her record after the SNP’s first decade in government.
At the weekend, I picked up a recently published book On Scotland’s Conscience. Its purpose is to make the case for the Highlands and Islands, more than half a century on from the pioneering establishment of the Highlands and Islands Development Board in 1965.
It explores what is to happen next to economic and community development there now that the SNP administration at Holyrood is minded to subject its governance to closer national scrutiny through a Scotland-wide board that encompasses not only all Scotland’s enterprise agencies, but also skills and university funding.
A key contribution to On Scotland’s Conscience comes from James Hunter, for six years at the turn of the century board chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the successor body to HIDB. He is also, as he makes clear in this book, an SNP voter and party member.
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“Like SNP ministers,” he writes, “I want Scotland to be an independent country. Unlike SNP ministers however, I am firmly of the view that Scotland (a small but diverse nation where the northeast,the Borders, the southwest and other regions are, in their own ways, just as unique as the Highlands and Islands) is not well served by centralism and control freakery of the sort that have become of late so all pervasive.”
One of the few predictable outcomes of tomorrow’s general election is that the SNP, despite some losses, will command the vast majority of MPs that Scotland sends to Westminster. But, as Professor Hunter cautions, it also should be willing “to concede the possibility that it might not be Scotland’s one and only source of wisdom”.