Let me add something along the lines of footnotes to the accounts of the enormous victory of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party in the British election last Thursday.

First, the numbers. The Conservatives won 365 seats in the House of Commons, which gives them a majority of 80 if every other member votes against them. The election yielded the most seats Conservatives have won since the days of Margaret Thatcher, when they took 397 in 1983 and 376 in 1987. It’s a parliamentary majority that will endure for the five-year limit on this term of Parliament.

The Labour Party won only 203 seats. That’s the lowest number for Labour since the election of 1935, 84 years ago. This is a harsh repudiation of the party and its left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Second, this was an immense personal victory for Johnson. Twelve months ago, he was a much-mocked backbencher, having resigned as foreign minister in July 2018 to protest the latest feckless proposal by Prime Minister Theresa May to reach an agreement to withdraw from the European Union. British voters, in their highest election turnout ever, voted to Leave rather than Remain in the EU, but May, a Remain voter, placed the negotiations in the hands of civil servants — "Yes, minister" types — determined to frustrate the will of the 17.4 million Leave voters, the largest number of Britons in history voting for any party or position.

Remainers on the BBC, and even at Sky News, the Times, the Financial Times, and the Economist — affluent and fashionable Londoners — increasingly felt free to dismiss Leave voters as bigoted and stupid. Former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major called for a second referendum, while the Liberal Democrats promised to ignore any referendum result that didn’t support Remain. A majority of parliamentary constituencies voted for Leave, but a majority of members of the House of Commons supported Remain and, as May fumbled, became increasingly bold in their contempt for their fellow citizens.

In the end, they didn’t capture the hearts of the people. Immediately after May missed her own March 31, 2019, deadline for withdrawing from the EU, the Conservative Party fell behind Labour in the polls. Conservatives finished fifth, with a pathetic 9%, in the May 2019 European Parliament elections in which Britain only participated because it hadn't withdrawn as expected. May was finished, and by June, she accepted that she must resign.

This time, Johnson was elected in her place. As the lead spokesman for Vote Leave, he was the obvious candidate for party leader after the June 2016 referendum, but he was opposed at the last minute by his up-to-then ally Michael Gove. That left the field open for May. Johnson became prime minister in July 2019, but Remainers, confident now that they could somehow prevent Brexit, had majorities in the Commons and the overt support of Speaker John Bercow, who abandoned the traditional neutrality of his office.

Johnson prorogued (kept out of session) Parliament for two weeks more than usual for the three party conferences, and when fellow Conservatives opposed his policy, he “withdrew the whip,” throwing them out of the party and effectively preventing them from running as Conservatives in the next election. Parliament passed a bill barring him from withdrawing from the EU on his promised date of Oct. 31; he contemptuously complied. Still refusing to rule out a “hard Brexit” — leaving the EU without a Withdrawal Agreement and trading under WTO terms — he got the EU to agree to what smug Remainers said it never would.

In all his defiance, Johnson's course resembled that of William Pitt the Younger's tenure as prime minister in 1783 and 1784. Pitt was installed by King George III, and Johnson was effectively installed by the majority in the Brexit referendum, but both lacked majorities in the Commons. Both were pummeled each day by smug and eloquent opponents, ridiculed for their oddities and supposed incompetence. Both stood and took it, returning day after day to experience more humiliating roll calls. Both were confident that they had the backing of the voters, and both outmaneuvered their opponents to call a general election.

Pitt won an overwhelming victory in the election of 1784 and remained prime minister until he resigned in 1801. He then returned to the office in 1804 until his death in 1806. Only 24 in 1783, he served as prime minister for a large majority of his adult life. Johnson, who is 55, is unlikely to last so long in office. But last Thursday, he won a victory as smashing and as personal as Pitt’s. And under the fixed-term law that David Cameron’s Lib Dem coalition partners persuaded him to pass, he is set to be prime minister, with a large majority, for five years.

For two insightful portraits of Boris by two writers who have known him since the 1980s, see this July 2019 Quillette article by Toby Young (son of Michael Young, the author of Meritocracy) and this post-election piece by Andrew Sullivan.

A third note: I’ve known Dominic Cummings a dozen years, from the time he was leading a successful campaign to keep Britain out of the Euro. He was the lead strategist of the Vote Leave campaign and is widely credited with securing the Brexit majority in June 2016. (The definitive account is Tim Shipman’s All-Out War.) When Johnson moved into 10 Downing Street, he called Cummings in and put him in charge of political strategy and planning for a general election.

Throwing Remainer Conservatives out of the party — not just cranky backbenchers but former chancellors of the exchequer, foreign ministers, home ministers, and a grandson of Winston Churchill — was a daring move characteristic of Cummings, who has often voiced his contempt for Conservative MPs, civil servants, and all of SW1 (the postal code for Parliament and the whole Westminster village). So was the Conservatives’ three-word campaign slogan, voiced often at the focus groups Cummings studies closely: “Get Brexit Done.” So was the emphasis on beefing up the National Health Service and treating it as an essential and central institution of British nationalism rather than (as some free marketeers regard it) an inefficient anachronism.

Johnson and his campaign trail companion, Michael Gove, had worked with Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign, and Gove had hired him during his years as education secretary between 2010 and 2014. In that post, despite a hostile bureaucracy and a very hostile national teachers union called NUT, Gove established hundreds of “academies,” very similar to American charter schools, mostly free from stifling government bureaucracy and union rigamarole. Cummings left late in the term, and Cameron transferred Gove out of Education in July 2014 for fear that his presence there would motivate the teacher unions to oppose Conservatives vigorously in the May 2015 election. But as Cummings argues, the academies continue to exist, and parents and children who did well in academies will continue to be a political constituency for Gove-like education reform for many years to come.

In other words, Cummings understands that policies can be changed back and reforms can lose their edge, but the creation of long-term constituencies for policies is more lasting. He thinks more of the creation of special government organizations capable of achieving distinct, difficult goals and generating creative ideas over the long run. In some of the very long blogs he has written over several years, Cummings has voiced his contempt for standard bureaucracy and his admiration for some public sector organizations that actually got things done — the Manhattan Project, NASA’s moon launch program, the Defense Department’s DARPA — and for some similarly venturesome and unconventional private sector initiatives. Now Johnson is keeping him on, with a view toward reforming British government. A Sunday Telegraph headline reads “Boris Johnson plans radical overhaul of civil service to guarantee ‘people’s Brexit.'”

So, how about the Labour Party? Formed in 1900, it led its first government coalition in 1923; in this election, it won fewer seats in the House of Commons, just 203, than it has in any election since 1935.

Conservatives won 66 Labour-held seats, mostly in the Midlands and North of England, part of the “Red Wall” (in British politics, Labour is colored red, Conservatives blue) of Labour seats from the North Sea west to the Irish Sea and the border of Wales. These were historic gains for the Conservative Party, which has not carried many of these seats for decades — in some cases for a century. They included former coal mining and industrial seats such as Bishop Auckland (Labour since 1935), Rother Valley (Labour since 1918), Don Valley (Labour since 1922), Blyth Valley (Labour since 1950), and Leigh (Labour since 1922). The biggest swing from Labour to Conservatives, as political scientist John Burne-Murdoch calculated, came in seats with low percentages of college graduates and high percentages of low-skilled workers.

These seats all voted Leave in the Brexit referendum, as did virtually all the seats Conservatives gained from Labour (the one seat they lost to Labour, Putney, in affluent London, voted heavily Remain). But Brexit wasn’t the only issue. This was also a backlash against Labour’s left wing party leader Corbyn and the coterie of left-wing North London aides who dominated the party. Voters brought up in the working-class tradition of the North of England were turned off by Corbyn’s refusal to sing the national anthem, by the video in which he identified his pronouns as him and his, by his past association with IRA terrorists (he invited them to Westminster Palace days after they blew up the hotel where Margaret Thatcher was staying at the Conservative Party conference), and by his tolerance and effective encouragement of vile expressions of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

In the Brexit referendum, the great difference between electoral blocs was not the traditional divide between the affluent and the working classes. It was geographic — between the metropole and the ethnic fringes (London voted 60% and Scotland 62% for Remain, with higher percentages in both posh Kensington and heavily Muslim Tower Hamlets), while the heartland of England beyond metro London, with 70% of the population of the United Kingdom, voted 57% Leave. Yvette Cooper, a former contender for the Labour leadership, after nearly losing her Northern seat, said the Corbyn leadership took working-class people for granted and, while it ran reasonably well in cities (northern Manchester as well as London), got clobbered in the more numerous northern towns.

The Corbyn crowd hoped that promises of economic redistribution — higher taxes on the rich, free tuition, and free broadband — would bring back traditional working-class voters to the Labour Party. But this “boob bait for the Bubbas,” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s phrase, didn’t work. It lacked credibility — where would they find all that money? — and failed to offer the one thing the metropolitan elite refused to offer people with traditional working-class outlooks: respect.

The Conservative breakthrough in the Red Wall, their success in the North of England, gives them a different sort of constituency than Margaret Thatcher won in the 1980s. Those Conservative majorities were tilted toward the south of England, toward the affluent and those made affluent by purchasing public housing or seeing their privately purchased houses zoom up in value in London and southeast England’s robust housing market. They appreciated Thatcher’s contraction of the public sector and the resulting expansion of the private sector. But in the North, Thatcher Conservatives were resented for allowing the contraction of old, heavy industry and coal mining and for reducing labor unions’ powers.

Johnson’s Conservative Party is more northern, more downscale, with more “loyalty to the land beneath your feet,” in the phrase of British analyst Sumantra Maitra.

It is also a party committed to heavier spending on the NHS, to infrastructure projects in the North, even if they score low on cost-benefit grounds.

The left-wing Labour and “one nation” Conservative tendencies of the parties are contrary to their character 20 years ago. Tony Blair’s New Labour Party, with its respect for free markets and accommodation of Thatcherite reform, made huge inroads in the affluent south of England while holding onto traditional industrial Labour seats without any heavy-breathing effort. But opposition to Blair’s backing of the Iraq war and left-wing dissatisfaction with his free market policies has changed the party, without devastating electoral consequences. Blair’s New Labour won 418 seats in the 1997 general election, more than twice as many as the 203 seats Corbyn’s Labour Party won last Thursday.

The Conservative Party’s response to New Labour’s strength was initially an attempt to gain ground in the Thatcherite south. Cameron, elected party leader in 2005, took up environmental issues and proclaimed that the blue Conservative Party was also green. As prime minister from 2010 to 2016, he and his ally, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, pursued austerity, eliminating 1 million public sector jobs while cutting taxes. That exactly doubled the Conservative seat total from 165 in 1997 to a narrow majority of 330 in 2015. Then Cameron and Osborne took the opposite position on Brexit from what Thatcher’s admirers think she would have taken, and they were swept from office in 2016. May’s snap election reduced the Conservative total to a non-majority of 317; Johnson’s new Conservative Party is now up to a robust, Thatcher-sized 365.

I discern a pattern here, in Britain and in the United States as well. Post-World War II political parties increased the size of the state and pursued policies that led to runaway inflation. Conservatives did this as well as Labour in Britain, Republicans as well as Democrats in the U.S. Then free-market-oriented reformers came to power — Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Ronald Reagan in 1981 — and produced dynamic economic growth and created robust majorities for their center-right policies, centered in affluent metropolitan areas. In response, center-left parties, after repeated trouncings, turned right, and under the leadership of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair eschewed leftish expansions of government and attracted many of the upscale conservatives who had formed the basis of Thatcher and Reagan majorities.

But after the revitalized center-left loses power, Democrats in 2001, New Labour in 2010, their party turns sharply left and, either because its leaders overlook the obvious political lessons or because they elevate conviction over calculation, present an image favored by the upscale metropolitan Left but repulsive to its historic working-class base outside the largest metropolitan areas. Attempted bribes of its traditional downscale supporters are rejected as transparently insincere and irrelevant to on-the-ground circumstances. And the center-right party accepts the cues of the political marketplace, shifts its policies to match an increasingly non-metropolitan and downscale base. The question now is whether the newly oriented center-right governments of Donald Trump and Johnson can produce results for which new constituents will see as fulfilling their promises.

Similar patterns can perhaps be discerned, or teased out of recent election results, not just in Britain and America, but also in their Anglosphere cousins in Australia and Canada and perhaps in European and Latin American nations as well. But that gets beyond what has already become a lengthy analysis of what I am sure will long be regarded as a landmark British election, and one whose outcome seems rooted in fundamental trends but which nonetheless seemed far from certain even a few months ago. Political talent, in this case Johnson’s, can make a difference in the political life of a nation.

Finally, are there any implications for the U.S.? There are many possible analogies between the political scenes in the U.K. and the U.S. In the victory of Johnson’s Conservative Party one can find reasons to imagine the reelection of Trump this year, but certainly not to imagine it as inevitable. The unpalatability of Corbyn’s Labour Party would certainly seem to provide some cautionary lessons for America’s Democrats, though many of them are as unlikely as the Corbynista faithful to find them persuasive. Certainly, as I have written since June 2016, there are resemblances between the two nations’ emergent political divisions between the metropole and the ethnic fringe on one side and the geographic and historic heartland on the other — and between the center-left party moving upscale and the center-right party moving downscale in their appeal and their core constituencies. In both countries, we have seen predictions proven wrong, at least temporarily, that an increasing number of non-white voters and the attitudes of younger generations would make it impossible for center-right parties to win national elections.

The final point is that individual politicians can make an enormous difference in framing issues and determining outcomes. Johnson, moldering on the backbenches a few months ago, made such a difference this year. Trump did the same in 2016. Can he do it again next year?