Boris Johnson Bets on a Strategy Theresa May Ignored

The Conservative Party did not lose Britain’s 2017 general election, but it has spent the last two and a half years trying to understand why it did. The Labour Party, in contrast, did lose the 2017 election but has acted as if it did not, convinced that its only mistake was not doing enough of what had worked the time before.

This is the strange context in which the latest British election is being fought. To a remarkable extent, this election is offering voters the same choice it offered in 2017: between a new Conservative prime minister with a healthy poll lead asking for a personal mandate to deliver Brexit, and an unpopular Labour leader standing on a platform of redistributive populism and insisting that it is policy, not personality, that matters most. As in 2017, it is a contest between two sharply competing