Only some lessons partially learned by the GUardian

Interesting to see two of my favourite Graun columnists trying to explain what went wrong after they had given us the clearest warnings about Johnson and Brexit. Kettle first

to treat Labour rather than the Conservatives as the biggest story in town is at best perverse and at worst a form of denial....While Labour agonises about how to reassemble a coalition of classes and interests for the future, it is the Tories’ success in creating such a coalition in the here-and-now that shows how far the opposition will have to go.

 A strange rather grudging section then:

Few dispute that the emergence of the working-class Tory vote in the north and Midlands last week was catalysed by Brexit. But both the research and the anecdotal evidence [Islington Man] show that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and Labour’s spending plans were also crucial.

No doubt because of the latter rather than the former.

After a result like last week’s it might be wiser to experiment for a while by treating the Tory party as a rational organisation, and its voters as people making reasoned decisions...Poll results show this [factors in reverse order  for Kettle]:
[Tory voters thought] that the party leader would make a better prime minister (58%), that the party would run the economy better (64%), and that the party would get their preferred Brexit outcome (68%)...these swing voters do not seem to be Brexit obsessives to the exclusion of all other issues.

They don't seem to be raving racists or football hooligans either Then nearly an apology, but not half as fulsome and grovelling as I would have liked:

Don’t write him off. It would be premature, less than one week into Johnson’s unfettered premiership, to assume everything he does can be dismissed as merely rightwing. A certain humility is in order in the wake of 12 December.

Behr now. He begins with the same old personal stuff. That might have been justified in the name of campaigning for Truth in the Election, in the nasty petite bourgeois personal  Twitterish mode we now have. But now? It is an ideological surplus, at least for the next few years. Gosh -- it might even be personal class prejudice.

Unreliability is Johnson’s business model, as is attested by everyone whose misplaced trust has been incinerated to fuel the engine of his ambition.[However] Victory buys loyalty. [But] The voters who gave Johnson his majority will not be so easily wooed back if they start to feel neglected or mistreated

Johnson

benefited from intensified frustration that Brexit was not getting done [who knew?], plus hardening of sentiment against Jeremy Corbyn....The obvious and predictable mistake for the opposition to make would be relying on Conservatives to conform to their most wicked caricature [i.e. believe the GHuardian]

Behr still harbours hope in a kind of revenge fantasy way:

Moderate Tories who thought the cushion of a parliamentary majority might be used to soften Brexit have been swiftly disabused of the idea. Johnson plans to amend EU withdrawal legislation to prohibit any transition beyond December 2020. Apparently this is meant to reassure voters and show Brussels that Britain means business. In reality it proves that the Tories learned nothing from the article 50 negotiations or have forgotten that the ticking clock [oh no] favours the bigger, better prepared side in trade talks.

It means the Graun has learned nothing from the Tories's use of confrontation and stubbornness in negotiation. So what of the future:

Labour is currently feeling too jilted by leave voters to dare raising its already dampened pro-European voice. [Graun columnists too, we might have hoped]...But over time, [new Tory MPs for Northern constituencies] will feel a tension between their constituents’ interests and a Brexit model conceived by the older breed of southern, pinstriped Conservative Eurosceptics. Workington Tories may be pro-Brexit, but that does not mean they are acolytes of the ideology that scorns state intervention as an affront to liberty and treats worker protections as shackles on the spirit of buccaneering enterprise [Behr knows them so well] .... If it comes down to a choice between serving the traditional Tory base that brought him this far and cultivating the new electoral terrain that opened up for him last week, which would [Johnson] prefer? 

Working class voters will not be aware of this sophisticated contradiction, of course, the mugs, and none have agonised over it on TV vox pops, have they? No 'reasoned decisions' are possible for Behr, and there are no awkward compromises in politics, only guardianista lofty abstract moral principles.

At the end of the day, Behr knows Johnson is a cad and we will see through him:

The unknown quantities are how many [blunders], how soon and how long he will get away with it.