As most readers will know, General Election campaigning at a local level resumed today and at a national level is set to resume tomorrow. What most readers will not know is why.
The SKWAWKBOX was attacked earlier this week by the pro-Tory Guido Fawkes site for, among other things, mentioning that Theresa May hadn’t wanted to resume campaigning until Sunday. Fawkes claimed:
In fact, this was incorrect, as this blog had stated that May wanted to suspend campaigning until Sunday, not that it had been ‘announced’. And in fact, it turns out that ‘until Sunday’ meant including Sunday, as Mrs May wanted no resumption of campaigning until Monday.
The SKWAWKBOX can exclusively reveal that the reason that this did not happen is because, in the clash between May and Jeremy Corbyn, Corbyn’s resoluteness caused May and her advisors to cave in:
A senior Labour source told this blog:
The Thursday/Friday phased start of campaigning has been a big victory for Jeremy and his team. The Tories were determined to take the suspension of campaigning through to Monday, and Labour called their bluff.
The resumption of national campaigning on Friday was announced to the rest of the team by Jeremy on Wednesday morning at Labour HQ after a meeting with John McDonnell and the strategy team. Even at that point, we were aware that the Tories might try to smear us as ‘disrespectful’ to the families.
But in the end, they caved in and decided to go with Friday as well.
Basically the Tories were quite happy to silence the General Election campaign for as long as possible, as it has been going so badly for them. The papers know, because they were briefed that the pause was going to be 6 days, but they aren’t making it a story.
Jeremy was absolutely adamant that anything longer was giving in to the terrorists. He has insisted that we not only resume the campaign but go big – large gatherings, lots of people as a statement that it’s business as usual and Britain won’t be intimidated.
But the Tories really don’t want to be back campaigning, because they are running scared.
May appears to have hoped that the longer the suspension continued, the better it would be for her campaign. However, even that has backfired as the uproar about her cuts and condescension to the police has continued to grow and, by today, even all the mainstream channels were covering and discussing police cuts.
The Friday campaign restart is a clear victory for Corbyn’s resolve and makes a mockery of May’s claim about the Brexit negotiations. Yet again the Labour leader has shown that there’s only one person with the proven resolve and resilience to leave the negotiating table with a win.
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